Ivory, Blue & Caramel Silk Velvet Ikat Fabric – Rumi

The palest velvet we carry: pale blue, grey and caramel almonds laid over an ivory ground, the colour sitting in the tips of the silk pile so the whole cloth shifts as you cross the room. 40 cm wide, cut to order.

Product details

• Product type: handwoven silk velvet ikat (bakhmal), sold by the metre
• Origin: Margilan, Fergana Valley, Uzbekistan
• Weaving technique: warp ikat on a supplementary silk pile warp — the silk is tie-dyed before weaving, then raised over rods and cut by hand to make the pile, on a handloom
• Composition: pile 100% silk on a 100% silk ground — all-silk bakhmal, the most expensive of the velvets to weave
• Width: 40 cm (16 in)
• Main colours: ivory ground; pale blue; grey blue; caramel
• Design / motif: almonds and scrolls in a soft, faded palette (the Rumi design)
• Pile direction: the nap runs one way — mark it and cut every panel the same way
• Sold by: the metre — one unit is 1 m (1.09 yd), cut in one continuous length from 1 m up
• Condition: new, uncut from the bolt
• Care: dry-clean recommended. If you wash, do it by hand in cold water, never wring, dry flat with the pile up, never iron the face — steam from the reverse to lift the pile — and store rolled rather than folded

Suitable uses

Cushion fronts — a 45 cm square takes half a metre — jacket and coat panels, bags, a headboard, an ottoman top, the seat of an occasional chair. Keep it off a sofa seat in daily use, where silk pile crushes and polishes. More of this cloth is under Silk Velvet Ikats.

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, not metres, which is why velvet costs several times what a flat ikat does. Fewer and fewer masters still do it: by our count only two to four remain in Uzbekistan working silk velvet ikat on a handloom, and the craft came close to dying out altogether under Soviet factory production before Margilan weavers revived it in the 2000s. Expect what the loom leaves — motif edges clouded rather than crisp, a hairline of colour shift along the length, and slight variation in pile height. Colours differ between dyelots, so order the full length you need at once. More on the difference from a printed cloth in our handwoven versus printed ikat guide.

Cut to order and 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.