The process of making a hand-knotted rug

Making of "Kings and Queens" hand-knotted rug designed by Reuben Paterson.

The process of hand knotting rugs goes back a few thousand years. Famous in Iran and the Middle East, hand knotted rugs are made by hand-tying millions of knots on vertical strings, called the warp, on a frame/foundation. Knots are tied in rows, and before and after each row, a horizontal string, called weft, is passed through the warp and beaten down to compact the rows and give the rug a tight structure. Due to its accessibility, softness and durability, wool is the most commonly used material in hand-knotted rugs with natural silk usually utilised in combination with wool to add depth and highlight certain areas of  the design. It can take up to months or even years to complete a rug, depending on the knot density and type. A single hand-knotted rug takes about four to five months to make with multiple weavers working on a rug at a time.

The process:

After sourcing the finest quality wool and silk, the raw fibres are cleaned and sorted. Carding is where the fibres are straightened and teased into individual strands by hand ready for spinning. The carded fibres are then spun into yarn using a spinning wheel. Then, the Dye Master prepares the dyes to the right colour and the yarn is dyed by hand using traditional methods. The dyed yarn is allowed to dry naturally in the sun as it gives the yarn a special lustre and nuance to the colour. Once the yarns have dried, they’re wound into balls ready for the looms.

While the yarn is being prepared, pattern designers create a computer-generated graph from the original design. This acts as a rug map for the weavers. Hand-knotted rug weaving is carried out on a loom where every individual knot is weaved by hand, row after row. Once weaved, an initial hand carving of the rug details is made using scissors. The weaved rug is then cleaned several times on both sides to prepare it for finishing. Washing also helps soften the rugs, creating a luxurious feel. The washed rugs are then stretched out to dry and pinned to a frame to ensure they are the correct size. Any wrinkles to the rug are flattened out and the final drying creates deeper and clearer colours.

Hand knotted loom

The rug is laid flat and the pile height is evened out using large flat bladed shears. Then, clipping neatens out the design details by hand using scissors and any uneven threads are removed. The final stage is binding. The edges of the rug are neatly bound by hand using a needle and coordinating yarn that matches the design.

The end result is quality from every angle. Even the underside of the rug is a thing of beauty where you can see the individual knots and impeccable craftsmanship that has gone into making the designer rug.

Charm Quilt by Sophie Ballantyne

Dilana presents ‘Charm Quilt’, a 144cm x 178cm rug by Sophie Ballantyne, who is interning with us in our Christchurch workshop. 

Ballantyne is both a painter, designer and rug-maker; a combination of interests that saw an atypical model of creation for Dilana in this rug; Ballantyne designed, tufted, and finished the rug in a singular process.

If you’ve ever had the chance to enter the Dilana workshop you’ll know about the yarn wall, the roof-to-floor cubby holes stuffed full of hundreds of spools of yarn, sorted into various colour groups. But there’s also a haberdashery-like collection of boxes not on display, the leftover yarn from decades of Dilana’s rug-making history. Colours without matches, fragments from past creations, half-empty spools. It was this backroom collection of scraps that Ballantyne was drawn to (and then drew upon) when she started her internship. This quilt-graveyard became the catalyst for the creation of ‘Charm Quilt’, which looked at textile histories involving scraps and compilations.

Ballantyne was interested in the function of quilting as a historic way to repurpose fabric scraps, a process that imbues objects with notions of history, labour and community. This tradition was drawn upon to make ‘Charm Quilt’, whose title references a style of quilting made from scraps that were often collected and accumulated from peers.

The result is ‘Charm Quilt’, a pieced-together of the parts of Dilana’s history mixed in with Ballantyne’s signature practice exploring pattern design, textile histories and tumultuous colour.

Compositions in the Jar | Richard Killeen

Hang in any order. 

Hang in any group.

This was the instruction from the artist for his first cut-out work exhibited in ” across the pacific 1978”

Collection from a Japanese garden 1937 -
1978

Once shapes are liberated from the surface of canvas or a board, they become objects or things. 

A composition can be defined as a grouping of objects that have a distinct relationship with their audience or with their neighboring shapes.

We all collect "things", whether they be insects, notes, or buttons . We frame them by placing them in jars. Contains. The jar of a beloved insect lying on the corner of the library, creating a composition with its surrendering "thing".

Killeen's objects and forms, the jars of insects and moths, invites the  opportunity to compose our own compositions within our own environment, be it  a floor or wall.