Rugs

In the villages of the Moroccan Atlas, rugs have been woven by hand for as long as anyone has counted - by Amazigh women, on upright wooden looms, one knot at a time. The craft is matrilineal. Until quite recently none of it was made for export: a rug was a blanket on a cold mountain night, a piece for a daughter's wedding, a record of a life. The symbols in the wool are not decoration. They are language and biography, the maker writing her own story into the piece she is making.

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Not every rug we bring back is a mountain piece. Morocco's cities had their own workshop tradition - carpets knotted to order, with the medallions and dense colour of a formal room. These vintage pieces have travelled further and lived longer; decades have softened the wool and settled the dye into something no new rug can fake. And a newer generation of weavers, in the same villages, with the same knot, has begun drawing more freely - looser, closer to a line drawing than a grid. The tradition has not stopped. It has kept moving.

For the story of how these rugs reach us, read Our man in Marrakech in the Journal.

MAKER SPOTLIGHT

Fratelli Bonvini

Fratelli Bonvini has been a stationery shop and printworks on Via Tagliamento in Milan since 1909, kept just as it was by the typographers who took it over in 2014. Its archive of type, ornament and printing blocks now supplies notebooks, greeting cards and pencils, with covers by Milan illustrators and by Cabaret Typographie, the letterpress collective in residence at the shop. Exclusive to Australia.

Cabaret Typographie prints

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