We often talk about Kurd and Yomut pieces as instances in which offset knotting is used to make and to smooth steeper diagonals. It struck me, reading the thoughts of both of your in Daniel's salon, that Ersari ikat guls seem often to contain diagonals that have different degrees of steepness and should likely therefore also exhibit some offset knotting.

But I looked closely at one I own (see a close-up i Daniel’s answer below) and it seems not to. What are your thoughts here? Are these diagonals of differing degrees of steepness? If so, how is this effect achieved without offset knots?

Ikat pile replications actually need a degree of raggedness to ape that of the real ikats so they don't need to worry about smoothness. Are they achieving the steeper angle by putting it two rows of knots (rather than one) at each level of the diagonal before moving over? Is this a way of achieving a steeper diagonal without resorting to offset knotting? If so, then steepness itself is not always an indicator of the presence of offset knotting. You always have to look at the knotting more closely.

Or am I misreading the knotting?

(A close-up of Ersari ikat guls is in the next message.)

Regards,

John Howe

John’s example (left side off the photo) as well as another example pointed out in an aside message from Christoph Huber (right side of the photo) of steep diagonal of differing degrees in Ersari Beshir chuvals with "ikat guls" are interesting as they show that the "steepness" of the diagonal is probably not the most important reason to use offset knotting.

The steepness isn’t dependant of the use of offsetting but the "smoothness" of the diagonal can’t be achieved without offsetting.

Diagonals in John’s example (left) are drawn as in 1 and 2 while they are most probably drawn as in 1, 2 and 3 in Christoph’s example (right). While 2 and 3 are steep they weren’t drawn with offset knotting.

Notice also that diagonals in 2 (no offsetting) and 4 (with offsetting) are parallels. So it’s clearly possible to achieve diagonals with the same inclinations with or without offset knotting and that the reason for offsetting was most probably the smoothness of the diagonal.

Notice also in 4 and 5, woven with offset knotting, that the fineness of knotting is an important factor to determine the steepness of the diagonals. The height of each offset knot in 4 and 5 is exactly the same, the only difference is that there twice more warps in 5 than in 4.

Just some thoughts,

Daniel