Before arriving at the Anou Cooperative in Fes, I spent a week in Chefchaouen. While exploring the rug shops, I saw that many rugs combined pile knots and flat weave visibly in the design, creating two different dimensions. I knew I wanted to play with this technique and intentionally incorporate multiple dimensions in my design.

Wandering the city, I noticed all the orange trees lining the street. The oranges were bright and vibrant against the green leaves and blue sky, and I knew I wanted to use this color combination as the main focus of my design. To create two different dimensions, I planned to knot floating oranges and leaves over a flat weave background of blue sky and a black diamond grate for visual interest. Many of the rugs I had seen incorporated geometric motifs like checkerboards, so I added a black and white checkerboard border as a ode and to frame the piece.

Upon arriving at the Anou, the artisans advised me to keep the plain weave to the blue background, and make the black diamond grate out of knots as well, so I adjusted my design by making the diamonds bigger as not to overwhelm the main orange and leaves design. Upon dying the yarns, my first green ended up too blue, so I revisited the swatches to select a slightly yellower green.

During the 10 days of weaving, I started to create one orange a day to track my progress. On days where I spent more hours weaving, the orange was larger, and on half days, it was smaller. To accommodate these into my design in an aesthetically pleasing way, I would place some of the smaller oranges against the side so that they were cut off. The final result was a 1.5m rug.