Red & Golden Yellow Silk Velvet Ikat Cushion Cover – Lamp Medallions

The lamp motif in gold on red, with blue and green worked into the outlines. Four colours means four rounds of tying the same warp before the loom is threaded.

Product details

• Product type: silk velvet ikat cushion cover (bakhmal) — cover only, no insert
• Origin: cloth handwoven in Margilan, Fergana Valley; cover cut and sewn in our workshop in Bukhara, Uzbekistan
• Front: handwoven silk velvet ikat — the pattern is tie-dyed into the silk pile before weaving, so the colour sits in the tips of the pile
• Back: handwoven cotton in a matching colour
• Size: 37 × 58 cm (15 × 23 in)
• Insert: not included — takes a 37 × 58 cm insert
• Closure: concealed zip in the side seam
• Main colours: red with golden yellow, cobalt and green
• Design / motif: lamp medallions in two rows, each with a hooked stem
• Pile direction: the nap runs one way, so the front reads darker or lighter depending on where you sit
• Condition: new
• Care: dry-clean. If you must wash, cold by hand with the insert out, never wring, dry flat with the pile up, never iron the face — steam from the reverse to lift the pile

Where it goes

The single strong cushion on a plain sofa or a dark chair. More covers in this cloth are under Velvet Ikat Pillow Covers.

How this velvet is made

Bakhmal is the most laborious cloth Uzbek weavers make: the pattern is tied and dyed into the silk before a single pass is woven, and the weaver then works two warps at once — the ground, and the supplementary silk that is lifted over rods and cut by hand, row by row, to stand up as pile. A day at the loom is measured in centimetres. Fewer and fewer masters still do it: by our count only two to four remain in Uzbekistan working silk velvet ikat on a handloom. Because the cloth is woven 40 cm wide, a cover this size comes out of a single width with no join across the pile. Expect what the loom leaves — clouded motif edges, a hairline of colour shift, slight variation in pile height. The same cloth is sold silk velvet ikat by the metre if you would rather sew your own.

Dispatched from Bukhara within 24 hours by Uzbekiston Pochtasi tracked airmail: USA 9–18 working days, Europe and the UK 8–16, elsewhere 10–20.