Khayamiya is the appliqué of Cairo's tentmakers: needle-turned cotton shapes stitched by hand onto *tark*, a plain canvas of linen or hemp built from four hand-woven strips joined down the middle. The panels line the *suradeq*, the ceremonial tent, so they are read from across a room — medallions a metre wide, borders you could walk along.

The palette is dated, not decorated. Before the 1920s the dyers had white, indigo and madder red; orange, purple and tan arrive after. So the field is saturated indigo canvas, the accent is that 1920s orange, and undyed cotton stays where it belongs — in the cut shapes, never as the ground.