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Encyclopedia Britannica (online) describes a Kilim as: "pileless floor covering handwoven by tapestry techniques in Anatolia, the Balkans, or parts of Iran. In the rest of Iran, the Caucasus, and Turkistan, the name for similar pieces is palaz. In most kilims, a slit occurs wherever two colours meet along a vertical line in the pattern, but in a few Karabagh or South Caucasian pieces, interlocking methods are employed in order to minimize these slits.
The difference between a kilim rug and a carpet or pile rug is that the design visible on the kilim is made by interweaving the variously coloured wefts and warps, thus creating what is known as a flatweave, in a pile rug individual short strands of different color, usually of wool, are knotted onto the warps and held together by pressing the wefts tightly against each other. In this case the whole design is made by these separately knotted strands which form the pile, and the patterns become clearly visible after any excessive lengths of the knotted materials are shorn off to create a level surface.
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