Coral and Ivory Diamond Gül Jaldar Rug, Hand-Knotted Wool

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, finished with an ivory fringe at both ends. The stepped drawing inside each gül — ivory, black, gold and blue-grey within about fifteen centimetres — needs a fine knot to stay legible.

Be realistic about the ground. At 133 on the brightness scale the coral is a mid-tone, not a dark one, so it will not hide marks the way a madder red would. The ivory in the medallions and the borders adds up to a good deal of the surface and is more exposed still. At this size the rug will most likely sit somewhere with concentrated traffic, so a hallway or a wall suits it better than a kitchen or a doorway to the garden.

Rugs of this design nearly always put pale drawing on a dark ground. This one puts its ground in the middle instead. Measured on the nought-to-255 brightness scale, the coral field reads 133. The ivory inside the medallions reads 211, seventy-eight points above it. The near-black outlining reads 37, ninety-six points below. The ground sits roughly halfway between the lightest and darkest wool on the rug.

That gives the drawing somewhere to go in both directions, and it is why the güls have the relief they do. Each medallion is built up in ivory against the coral and cut back into it in black, so the same emblem reads as raised and as incised at once — an effect a dark-ground rug cannot produce, because there the drawing can only ever come forward. It also explains the palette. A mid-toned ground needs both a genuinely pale wool and a genuinely dark one to work against, which is why this small rug carries a full ivory and a near-black rather than the single accent colour a deeper ground would need.