• Texture

The Qashqai carpet is mostly soft and almost delicate and thin, and this is what distinguishes it from other Iranian carpets. The knots in the Qashqai carpet are woven symmetrically and asymmetrically. Due to the quality of the texture and not use of fake knots, as well as the use of two wefts in each row, these carpets remain healthy over time and do not suffer from quality loss and obsolescence. The Qashqai tribe uses horizontal looms to weave carpets, unlike other Iranian carpets. This tribe live inside the tent, for this reason, they usually weave horizontally on the ground, and then the weaver sits on it and starts weaving.

      Qashqai women are weaving rug on horizontal loom

• Dye

Carpet dyeing is another feature of Qashqai handwoven carpet. Due to the use of natural colors in the dyeing stage, the color of these carpets has a unique quality and beauty. The weavers obtain the natural colors of the carpet from nature using plants such as madder, indigo, onion, etc. The colors used in the Qashqai carpet actually impose more costs on the weaver, but they have special characteristics. Non-sensitivity for children, more transparency, durability, stability against light and water… are among these things.

                                      Dyeing

• Fibers

Carpet fibers are classified into 4 main categories: cotton, wool, silk and fluff. Cotton and wool are the most used fibers used in Qashqai carpet weaving. The choice of high-quality wool as the fibers of Qashqai handwoven carpets has made the quality of the carpets in this area very suitable. Of course, because wool is not easily available, weavers in urban and rural areas also use cotton and silk fibers, and as a result, the elegance and price of the carpet increases.

• Designs

We can divide the patterns of Qashqai handwoven carpet into two main groups. The first category are traditional nomadic designs . These designs have been less affected by the changes of time. The characteristics of these designs are the geometric and mental states of the images, as well as not following a specific pattern and not having a specific order, and avoiding parallelism except in the border design.

The second category are continuous and symmetrical designs. Most of which do not have a nomadic or rural origin, and their design is usually inspired by urban woven carpets and other arts of urban civilization such as fabric.

Also reas: History of Qashqai hand-woven carpets