For years, a rug was defined before a single thread was ever cut — the knot, the pattern, the picture, all fixed from the very first day of weaving. CARVING AS AUTHORSHIP began the day I stopped asking what image belongs on a rug, and started asking what a rug could become without one at all.
The handloom gave me that freedom. Unlike hand-knotting, where every knot already carries the design, the handloom builds an open, even field — a uni surface with nothing yet decided. It is patient, precise, quiet work, done by hand in India on traditional looms, row by row, until the field is ready. Only then does the real design begin.
That is the shift at the heart of this collection: the loom no longer finishes the rug, it prepares it. What happens next — the height, the depth, the line, the plateau — is decided afterward, by hand, with a pair of scissors. HandLoom is the material becoming ready to speak. HandCarving is what it says.
A handloom rug is woven, not knotted — warp and weft, built row by row on a wooden loom, the way cloth has been made for centuries. For CARVING AS AUTHORSHIP we weave a fine, high-density construction, close to 24 picks to the inch, so the pile sits even and tight, with no structure showing through. It is this density, more than anything else, that gives the surface enough substance to carry a cut.
The foundation is always cotton, in warp and weft alone — quiet, structural, invisible once the rug is finished. Everything you see and feel belongs to the pile above it: silk, mohair, cashmere, alpaca, linen, merino, New Zealand wool, worked in on their own or blended, chosen as much for how they will behave under the scissors as for how they feel underfoot.
Where a hand-knotted rug is essentially finished the moment the last knot is tied, a handloom piece for this collection is not. It leaves the loom as a uni field — a single pile height, a single colour, nothing yet decided about its surface. That openness is deliberate. It is the blank canvas the entire idea depends on.
This is where the scissors become the author. Once a rug leaves the loom as an even, uncut field, we begin to carve — cutting height differences, lines, valleys and plateaus directly into the pile, by hand, the way a sculptor works a block rather than the way a pattern is printed. Nothing is drawn beforehand. The design happens in the cutting itself, and every decision made with the scissors stays visible in the finished piece.
We work in three depths, and each one speaks a different language. Step 01 — Surface, at around 6 mm, is the most restrained: a single, quietly sheared plane, close to the fibre. Step 02 — Relief, at 12 to 16 mm, is where real depth enters — waves, ribs, loops and soft transitions carved into the pile so that light begins to move differently across it. Step 03 — Sculpture, from 16 up to 24 mm, is the most demanding stage, where the surface is composed almost like a landscape — undulating, layered, sometimes drawing on textures I’ve noticed elsewhere: a pebbled beach, the scale of a fish, the coil of a labyrinth, the coat of an animal. None of these are printed or woven in. They are cut.
Carving, done this way, cannot be corrected the way a drawing can. What is cut remains. That is precisely why I think of it as writing rather than decoration — a line that, once made, becomes part of the material’s own history. No two pieces are ever quite the same, even within the same design, material and colour — every valley and plateau is cut individually, so what stays behind is not a copy of an idea, but the record of the decisions that made it.
That’s also why the largest studies in this collection — the round textile sculptures we present at 80, 100 and 120 cm — aren’t sold as samples in the usual sense. They are small works in their own right, meant to be looked at the way you’d look at a relief or a piece of sculpture: from an angle, in changing light, over time.
At Step 01 of every rug in this collection, before a single wave or plateau is even discussed, there is a harder decision: whose fibre. Quality is our mantra at RUG STAR, and in HandLoom it isn’t a marketing word — it’s the material itself, standing right next to the carving as the second author of every piece.
A fine handloom construction like ours is woven at roughly 24 picks to the inch — a density most fibres on the market were never bred, grown or shorn to survive. Spun too coarse or too weak, a yarn either won’t pack tightly enough to hold that density, or it frays the moment the scissors reach it later. So before we ever ask what a surface should look like, we ask what a fibre can carry: how fine it can be spun, how much tension it can take on the loom, how cleanly it will hold an edge once it’s cut.
That’s why we go to the source rather than the market — Mongolian cashmere combed by hand in spring, Andean alpaca bred at altitude for thousands of years, Anatolian mohair for its shine, European flax retted in the field the old way. Every material in this collection could be substituted for something cheaper. None of them are, because the moment you lower the fibre, you lower everything built on top of it — the density, the carving, the light.
Linen comes from flax — Linum usitatissimum — a plant that, unlike cotton, asks very little of the land it grows on. The finest flax in the world still comes from the belt running through Normandy, Belgium and the Netherlands, where a mild, humid coastal climate and rich, loamy soil let the stalks mature slowly rather than being forced. After harvest, the flax is pulled rather than cut, to keep every fibre at its full length, then left in the field for weeks to ‘ret’ — broken down gently by dew and rain until the fibre can be separated from the woody stalk without a single chemical involved.
The result is a bast fibre, not an animal one — cooler, more matte, and up to two to three times stronger than cotton. It has almost none of the elasticity of wool or the crimp of cashmere, and that’s exactly its value in this collection: linen holds a sharp, architectural cut without softening its own edge, which is why it sits at the calmer, more restrained end of our material register.
Only long, unbroken flax fibre — properly grown, properly retted, properly scutched — can be spun fine and even enough for a 24-pick construction. Anything shorter or weaker breaks under the loom’s tension long before it ever reaches the scissors, which is why we work exclusively with certified European flax.
Merino is a sheep breed that reaches back to Spain, but its finest wool today comes almost entirely from Australia, where climate, altitude and generations of selective breeding have pushed fibre fineness further than almost anywhere else on earth. Fineness is measured in microns — one-thousandth of a millimetre — and it is a scale where small numbers matter enormously: ultrafine merino, under 17.5 microns, makes up less than five percent of all the wool grown in the world, and a single micron of difference can change how soft a fibre feels against skin by as much as twenty percent.
What sets merino apart structurally is its crimp — a natural, springy wave along every fibre that traps air for insulation and gives the wool its memory, its ability to be compressed, cut and pushed back into shape without losing its form. That memory is exactly what makes merino the most versatile fibre in this collection: it holds a wave, a rib or a loop cut with real precision, and it takes colour evenly and deeply.
For our fine handloom construction, we work only with the finer merino grades, hand-selected and worsted into a tight, strong, even yarn capable of the density the collection demands. It is, in many ways, the most dependable material we carve — resilient enough to be reworked, fine enough to stay elegant.
Real silk begins with a single insect, the Bombyx mori silkworm, and a diet of nothing but mulberry leaves. Sericulture — the cultivation of silkworms for their cocoons — was first practised in China more than four thousand years ago, and to this day the fibre is harvested the same essential way: a cocoon is unwound, not spun from broken pieces, into one continuous filament that can run six hundred to nine hundred metres long. No other natural fibre in our collection behaves like this — everything else is short, staple fibre twisted together; silk is one unbroken thread.
That single fact explains almost everything about how silk performs on the loom and under the scissors. A continuous filament can be woven at extraordinary density with none of the fraying or fuzz you get from a staple yarn, which is exactly why our finest, most restrained Step 01 — Surface pieces are so often silk alone. Its faceted, near-triangular structure also catches and refracts light along a cut edge in a way no other fibre can, giving a hand-carved silk surface a precision and a shimmer that reads almost architectural.
Because that behaviour depends entirely on genuine, reeled mulberry silk — never a synthetic substitute sold under the same name — we work only with real silk, sourced and verified as such before it ever reaches the loom.
Alpaca has been bred in the high Andes of Peru for more than five thousand years, descended from the wild vicuña and raised at altitudes where thin air and huge swings in temperature between day and night shaped an extraordinarily efficient fibre. Most of what we use is huacaya — the dense, crimped, wool-like majority of the breed — though a small amount of the rarer suri, with its long, silky, almost liquid locks, finds its way into pieces that call for more shine.
What makes alpaca fibre unusual is its structure: a hollow, medullated core that traps air far more efficiently than a solid fibre of the same weight, giving genuine warmth without bulk. It also contains no lanolin, which makes it naturally hypoallergenic and means the pile stays cleaner, without the waxy residue wool can carry. Fibre for fibre, alpaca is also stronger than sheep’s wool, which matters enormously once you’re cutting 16 to 24 mm into a Sculpture-level surface — the pile needs to stand up structurally, not collapse under its own height.
That combination — light, warm, strong, naturally lustrous — is why alpaca carries some of the most demanding carving in this collection: the deeper the cut, the more a material’s own structure has to do the work of holding it.
Mohair comes from the Angora goat — not to be confused with Angora wool, which comes from a rabbit — a breed that originates in the highlands around Ankara, in Anatolian Turkey, and is raised today mainly in South Africa’s Eastern Cape and in Texas, alongside Turkey itself. Unlike cashmere, mohair is shorn rather than combed, twice a year, which means a single Angora goat produces several kilograms of fibre annually — far more than a cashmere goat ever will, and one of the clearest reasons mohair sits below cashmere in value, even though both are luxury fibres in their own right.
Structurally, mohair is the opposite of cashmere: coarser, at roughly 25 to 40 microns, with a smooth, low-scale cuticle instead of a fine crimp. That smoothness is exactly what gives mohair its signature: an almost liquid luster that catches and throws light along every cut, plus a natural elasticity and abrasion resistance that neither cashmere nor silk can match. Where cashmere gives softness, mohair gives brilliance and durability.
That is precisely the role mohair plays in HandCarving — often blended with wool for extra body, it is our material of choice whenever a relief needs to shine as much as it needs to hold its shape, catching light differently from every angle as the day moves across it.
The name ‘cashmere’ comes from Kashmir, where woven shawls of this fibre first reached Europe centuries ago and gave it its Western name — but very little of the cashmere used anywhere in the world today, including ours, actually comes from Kashmir itself. More than seventy percent of the world’s raw cashmere now comes from Inner Mongolia and the wider Mongolian and Chinese plateau, where the cashmere goat’s undercoat develops in direct response to brutal winters, sometimes down to minus forty degrees, at altitudes over a thousand metres. The colder the winter, the finer and longer the down that grows beneath the goat’s coarser outer coat — cold, in other words, is what makes cashmere cashmere.
It is also what makes cashmere rare. The fibre can’t be shorn; it has to be hand-combed, gently, during a few weeks each spring when the goat naturally moults, a long-toothed comb separating the fine undercoat from the coarse guard hair strand by strand. A single goat yields only 150 to 250 grams of usable cashmere a year — a fraction of what a merino sheep or an Angora goat produces — and the finest grades measure just 14 to 19 microns, noticeably finer than mohair’s 25 to 40. That is the honest answer to why cashmere sits above mohair in this collection: not because one fibre is simply ‘better’ than the other, but because cashmere is rarer, slower to harvest and finer to the point where very little of the world’s supply ever reaches true luxury grade.
For a 24-pick fine handloom construction, only that top grade will do — anything coarser or shorter felts unevenly and won’t hold the density the collection demands. It is, fittingly, the material we reach for when a piece calls for the deepest, most deliberate carving in the collection — Step 03 — Sculpture at its most demanding.
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