Traditional silk rugs
Made in Kashmir
Handcrafted
Woven with light
In Melbourne
In the serene valleys of Kashmir, Jan found her journey’s true purpose: the ancient and meditative art of silk rug weaving, a tradition woven as much from story and soul as from the strong, beautiful silk thread.
Silk rug weaving is one of the world’s oldest, most intricate and quietly disappearing arts, and it lives and breathes in one of the most breathtaking places in the world, Kashmir.
When you look at a Kashmir silk carpet of the highest quality, it is not merely a beautiful object. It is a civilisation’s accumulated knowledge of beauty, balanced on the edge of disappearing, held in place, for now, by the patience of two brothers and the sound of their voices calling to each other across a loom.
Kashmir’s silk rug tradition is one of the oldest and most refined craft histories in the world, stretching back over five centuries.
It all started with one worm. One thread. A kilometre and a half of the finest material the natural world has ever produced.
A filament so fine it is invisible to the naked eye, so strong it has been used in surgical sutures, so lustrous that emperors have gone to war over it.
The sericulture process is remarkably intricate, one of humanity’s oldest textile technologies, practised for over 5000 years.
It takes roughly 3,000 cocoons to produce just 500 grams of raw silk thread. A single large Kashmiri silk carpet might consume the output of tens of thousands of silkworms.
The organic dyeing of silk for Kashmir carpets draws on a pharmacopoeia of natural materials that has been accumulating and refining for centuries.
Silk accepts natural dyes with exceptional richness and permanence. The palette of a naturally dyed carpet becomes richer and more complex over decades, the colours settling into each other and into the silk.
Meet Jan
Craving human connection in the wake of a post-Covid world, Jan set off on two wheels through some of India’s most breathtaking and demanding terrain. This is where she discovered and felt in love with the intricate craft of silk rug weaving in Kashmir.
“This experience made me quiver: That nervous, almost disbelieving excitement you feel when you know you are in the presence of something truly remarkable, and you are terrified of looking away in case it disappears.
That feeling never left me and I continue to quiver whenever I meet a new and remarkable silk rug creation.”
