The Rug Library

A. Tellery set up a carpet factory in Bhadohi in the late 19th or early 20th century, and his son Otto Tellery was a founder member and first president of the All India Carpet Manufacturers Association.

Bhadohi carpets draw on Persian, Mughal and geometric design traditions, including floral motifs, medallions and elaborate borders.

Gultarash is an Indian term for the scissor work that carves and embosses a rug's pile after weaving to sharpen motifs and create a high-low effect.

Khadi gultarash (carving) is done with scissors held upright to cut a line into the design, while put gultarash (embossing) uses angled scissors around motifs to give a three-dimensional look.

In a carved rug, the pile is first sheared to an even height and then cut back along chosen lines, creating channels that make motifs stand out in relief.

Cutting the pile at an angle where two colours meet forms a V-shaped channel whose shadow sharpens the colour boundary, a method often called bevelling.

A 'high-low' or tone-on-tone carved rug can use a single colour throughout, relying only on differences in pile height to create pattern through shadow.

Carving adds texture as a design element: instead of relying on colour alone, the pattern is also read through the shadows cast by grooves in the pile.

Specialised carving scissors, including electric models with angled blades, are made for cutting grooves and bevels into rug pile, especially on tufted rugs.

Shearing levels a carpet's pile to a uniform height after weaving, evening out the small differences left when each knot is cut by hand.

Clipping, as described by India's Carpet Export Promotion Council, trims the pile around a motif's border so the motif appears to stand out from the background.

With longer piles, neighbouring yarns can blur a design, so finishers work line by line with a pointed tool to separate yarns and sharpen the pattern's edges.

Many weavers trim the pile with shears as knotting progresses, and shears are regarded as one of the core tools for bringing the pile to an even level.

Some Indian workshops use a shearing machine for the first levelling pass, then finish the pile by hand to refine details.

A final hand-shearing to even the pile is often among the last steps after a rug has been washed, bound and stretched.

Clipping sharpens a design by lowering the surrounding pile slightly, so it sits between simple shearing and full sculptural carving in the finishing sequence.

Jaipur Rugs created its 'Freedom Manchaha' collection with Rajasthan's prison department, reviving the link between Indian prisons and carpet weaving in a contemporary context.

The badaam motif is still widely used today, both in traditional Kashmiri shawls and in the chikankari embroidery of Uttar Pradesh.

Buta motifs remain common in contemporary Indian textiles, from shawls, saris and cushion covers to Bagru and Sanganeri block prints and Banarasi brocades.

Artist Pantea Karimi developed a concept design in response to the Wagner Garden Carpet for the Aga Khan Museum, one example of historic garden carpets inspiring new design work.

The earliest known cotton fibres are mineralised threads found inside copper beads in a grave at Mehrgarh (in present-day Pakistan), dated to around the 6th millennium BCE.

Cotton textile fragments and spindle whorls from the 3rd millennium BCE have been found at Mohenjo-daro and other Indus Valley sites, a likely early centre of tree-cotton cultivation.

Britannica describes raw cotton fibre as about 87–90% cellulose, 5–8% water and 4–6% natural impurities.

Four cotton species have been domesticated: Gossypium hirsutum and G. barbadense from the Americas, and the Old World species G. arboreum (tree cotton) and G. herbaceum (Levant cotton).