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Almost every classical rug shares one skeleton: a field framed by a wide main border, which is flanked by two to six narrow guard stripes. Many add a central medallion, often with pendants on its long axis, and corner spandrels that repeat a quarter of the medallion.
Layout and motif are separate choices. A rug can be "all-over" in layout and "Herati" in motif at the same time. This app keeps them separate in the same way.
The symmetric (Turkish, Ghiordes) knot wraps two warps; the asymmetric (Persian, Senneh) knot wraps one and lies loose round the next, so it packs tighter. Fine asymmetric knotting suits flowing curvilinear city drawing; the symmetric knot suits bold rectilinear village and tribal designs.
The names mislead: both knots are tied inside and outside Iran. The Drawing slider moves from village to city, and the knot count sets how smooth the curves can be.
Workshop rugs are woven from a naqsheh: a painted design on graph paper where each square is one knot. Because the design is mirror-symmetric, the designer usually draws only one quarter and the weaver reflects it. Village and nomad weavers often work from memory instead, which is why their corners and repeats wander.
Switch to Cartoon to see the knot grid, with the quarter a weaver would actually need in full colour.
Knot count matters: real rugs run from about 25 knots per square inch for nomad work to several hundred in fine city pieces, so the caption reports the density your settings imply. But a flat square per knot still looks like pixels. The Rug view treats each knot as two tufts of heathered yarn whose fibres spill into their neighbours and lean toward one end of the rug. It adds abrash, wavering village edges, overcast side cords, flatwoven ends and a knotted warp fringe. Pile texture controls most of this.
Medallion: one centred figure on a ground. Stacked: a column of hooked medallions, common in Anatolia and the Caucasus. All-over: an endless repeat with no centre. Prayer: a pointed niche (mihrab) at one end, so only left–right symmetry. Garden: compartments divided by water channels, after the Persian paradise garden. Gul rows: Turkmen octagons in rows with minor guls between.
Wool was dyed in small batches, so a weaver who ran out of one lot and began another left horizontal bands of shifted tone across the rug. This abrash is prized in old pieces. Palettes here are named after weaving centres whose colour habits they borrow, from Heriz brick red to the apricot and sage of Oushak.
The rug is computed knot by knot. The border is a stack of bands measured from the edge, with repeats fitted so each side mirrors at its middle and corners mitre cleanly. The field is evaluated in folded, quarter coordinates, so every design is symmetric the way a cartoon would make it. Contours come from a depth pass: a knot next to anything drawn on top of it becomes the dark outline colour.
Meanings below are traditional readings. They come mostly from oral tradition and dealer lore, and the same shape is read differently from village to village, so treat them as associations rather than a code.