A third-generation Ersari Turkmen weaving family. We draw the cartoons our relatives knot between northern Afghanistan and Turkey, sell them as digital patterns and as finished rugs and kilims, and send half of every sale home: fair pay for the people who make the work, and relief where it is needed.
Kalben Rugs is a family before it is a shop. We are Ersari Turkmen: a weaving people whose villages sit along the Amu Darya in northern Afghanistan. For three generations our hands have stayed on the same craft, even as the family itself spread across borders: many of our relatives still live and weave in the north of Afghanistan, while this part of the family now works from Turkey.
In our family the work has always been shared, and the roles were never carved in stone. Across three generations we have drawn the patterns, the nakış, the weaving cartoon that tells the loom exactly which color goes where, woven them, and sold them, often with the same hands doing more than one. Each generation kept the craft alive and handed it on. You can read how a drawing becomes a rug on our Craft & Heritage page.
We bring the whole craft together, and we work at both ends of it. We take the cartoons our family draws, the same Oushak, medallion, floral and geometric designs we have woven for decades, and prepare them as clean, production-ready digital patterns any weaver can buy and load straight onto a loom. And we buy and sell the finished rugs and kilims that come off those looms, so the woven work of our family and the community around them reaches you directly. A drawing that once lived on a single sheet of graph paper can now reach a loom anywhere in the world, and the rug it becomes can find a floor.
A weaving cartoon is the real value in a hand-knotted rug; months of a weaver's life are spent following it. Selling that design directly means the people who actually create it, the drawers and the weavers, are paid the full value their work deserves, without it being copied and traded out of their hands. Every pattern lists its exact size, knot quality and color palette, so a workshop knows precisely what it is buying, and the terms are set out plainly in our Pattern License. Much of this knowledge was nearly lost to a century of displacement, which is part of why we record it, a story told in the library that was never written down.
We send half of the revenue from every sale to northern Afghanistan: first to the people who drew and wove the work, paid the full value their craft deserves, and then to relief for those who need it most. This is not charity for the makers; it is what their art is worth. When you buy a pattern or a rug here, you pay the artists fairly, and you help the community that kept this craft alive.
That is the whole idea behind Kalben Rugs: keep an old craft earning for the hands that practice it, and let those same designs do some good back home. For the values behind the slow work, read the philosophy of the craft. Get in touch if you would like to know more, commission a custom cartoon, or work with us.
Kalben Rugs is operated by Kalben Rugs LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company, with relatives weaving in northern Afghanistan and this part of the family in Türkiye.
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