Vintage Patchwork Modern Overdyed Hand Knotted Area Carpet-Cyclamen 11072 9' x 12'

Cyclamen is a colour the dye chemists usually fail at. It sits between magenta and rose, slightly cool, with the saturation of an evening sky in late summer. Synthetic versions read as candy. Plant-derived versions read as faded. The overdye process behind this carpet was developed precisely to bridge that gap, by laying a single pink-violet bath over wool that already carries decades of accumulated colour history.

The base of this 9' x 12' (274 x 366 cm) field is a grid of patches lifted from carpets woven across the Anatolian and Persian highlands between roughly 1950 and 1985. Three weavers in India spent close to four months hand-knotting fresh seam stitches and rebinding the salvaged wool to a new cotton foundation. Once the field was structurally sound it went into a single immersion bath of cyclamen dye, which the older fibres absorbed at unequal rates, producing the patches a slightly different reading of the same colour.

The composition

Cyclamen pink across the entire field, but never the same cyclamen twice. Dark patches still hold the indigo of their original ground. Lighter patches glow almost coral where the old ivory accepted the dye in full saturation. Faded medallions and half-borders surface like watermarks. The discipline of the grid stops the colour from becoming sweet; the irregularity of the wool stops it from becoming slick.

What you are buying

Carpets of this construction sell at boutique European dealers in the range of four to six thousand pounds and are routinely framed as one-of-one textile pieces rather than rugs. The pricing here reflects direct sourcing from the Indian workshop rather than a re-sale margin, but the work itself is identical. Patchwork wool of this vintage gains rather than loses value as the years pass; the underlying fibre is already half a century old and only deepens further.

The piece in a room

The carpet is a confident object and prefers a quiet room around it. Pale plaster walls, an unfussy upholstered sofa in flax or natural linen, a low coffee table in dark wood. The cyclamen pulls warmth from the room and gives it back as a glow at floor level. It also reads beautifully in a primary bedroom where the bed sits two-thirds onto the field, with the colour radiating up the bedside walls.

Conservation

Vacuum weekly, suction only, beater bar off, in the direction of the pile. Spin the carpet a half turn every spring so footfall and sunlight age the field evenly. Blot any spills with cotton cloth from the outside in. Schedule a hand wash by a wool-trained conservator every six years. Treated this way, the carpet has decades ahead of it.

Reference

• Medium: hand-knotted vintage wool patches, overdyed cyclamen
• Dimensions: 274 x 366 cm (9' x 12')
• Construction: hand-knotted patchwork, continuous warp
• Hands: 3 weavers, ~4 months
• Pile: low, sheared uniform
• Dye: cyclamen pink overdye on aged wool
• Origin: India

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