Design Inspiration – Tibetan Tiger Rugs

The Tiger Rugs of Tibet by Mimi Lipton is one of those delicious design books that once I opened it I knew something good would come of it.  It highlights 108 (an auspicious number in Tibetan Buddhism) different rugs with tiger motifs. An interesting and scholarly text explains the origins of the style, weaving techniques, and materials and the significance of the tiger in Tibetan Buddhism.

For a decade I’ve flipped through it’s pages and dreamed of having a tiger rug in my home. So when the opportunity recently arose to design a custom tiger rug and have it made by Tibetan weavers in Kathmandu, Nepal I jumped at it!

Since I can’t be there to oversee the weaving (it will take four to five months before I see the final product) and probably won’t be able to approve lab dips for the yarn colors, I am taking a leap of faith that it will turn out just fine!

I worked up a design with a stylized tiger pelt bordered with jagged mountains wreathed in clouds. The mountains have meaning for my husband and me as we’ve spent lots of time exploring high places. The clouds also have personal significance as I have a wonderful and surreal memory of sitting high on a Himalayan plateau at night looking down onto clouds, a thousand feet below, illuminated within from flashes of lightning.

Our living room is narrow so the size rug I’ve chosen is not standard – 60” x 120”. I based my design on a rug from Lipton’s book, changing it only minimally. I drew my design to scale in my computer and then printed out enough of the design to get a feel for its scale. Just the very corner of the rug design used twelve sheets of paper which I then taped together and placed on my living room floor. I did this a couple of times before I felt sure the scale would work.

I played around with hanks of DMC embroidery floss to achieve a palette that I felt would work nicely with my furnishings. DMC floss colors are amazing for their wide range of choices and are great for specifying just the right shade. My colors are a little more muted than some of the tiger rugs in Lipton’s photographs, but they will work better in my home.

My packet went off to Kathmandu yesterday with a full-scale print out of half of the rug, yarn swatches for the dyer to match, and a colored reference sketch for the weavers.

In my professional design life I’m in intense and regular contact with the people making my goods, so this project will be an exercise in patience. Perhaps a fitting one for a carpet with roots found in sacred Buddhist art! I’ll share the end result – good or bad – when it arrives on my doorstep in the spring.

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