Sunbeam Bitrug Moodmat

Everything on this one is built out of squares. It is an oriental style medallion rug drawn as pixel art, portrait format, laid on a black field, and every motif is stepped: hard edges, no curves, no antialiasing. At the center an elongated octagonal reserve outlined in teal holds a stacked medallion of leafy arabesques and palmette wings around a four lobed brick red and teal rosette, flanked left and right by vertical leaf sprays on curling stems, with four small square rosettes in red, teal and white set at the quarters and a stepped cruciform reserve running above and below. The bands then work outward: a teal row of arrowhead tulip heads, a white pearl row, a brick red line, a teal crenellated meander, another pearl row, then the widest band of the lot, a scrolling wave vine with brick red S hooks tucked between the coils, then a pale pink pearl row, then a brick red and white sawtooth selvedge on the outside. There is no fringe, no tassels and no warp ends depicted on any edge, so it reads as a bound edge rug rather than a fringed one, and about a quarter inch of bare black rubber runs outside the selvedge, even on all four sides. No lettering anywhere.

The name is doing real work. One ink on this mat, the yellow and olive that fills the scroll vine and the medallion arabesques, runs a horizontal wet fade. Down the middle of the print that ink is pure lemon yellow. Out toward the left and right edges it settles into a flat olive khaki gold, and each transition takes about half an inch to get there. The result is a vertical band of bright yellow light running the full height of the piece, top border through the medallion to the bottom border, across roughly the middle 38 percent of the width, call it three and a quarter inches of the eight and a quarter. That is the sunbeam. Everything else holds steady from left to right: the teal, the brick red, the white and pale pink pearls and the black field do not fade at all. At full magnification the olive and yellow fills look slightly streaky and mottled, which is the wet blend sitting on the rubber grain rather than a flaw.

Now the part that matters most if you are buying one. The maker applies that blend wet and says plainly that gradient colors may vary and that each mat is slightly different. We have seventeen of these. The yellow band will not sit in the same place or run the same width on every one of them. Expect it to drift off center on some, to run noticeably narrower or wider than the photographed unit on others, to sit higher or lower in tone so that more of the pattern reads olive rather than lemon, and expect the two transition zones to be uneven with one side blending sooner than the other. That is how a hand applied wet blend behaves. It is a feature of how the thing is made, not a defect in your particular sheet, and the honest version is better than either hiding it or selling it as a one of a kind. The photograph on this page is one example of this colorway. It is not a picture of the mat that will arrive.

Under a blacklight the yellow and olive ink is the strongest responder by a wide margin and fires an intense electric lime through the center column. The teal bands, the meander, the arrowhead row, the corner rosettes and the octagon outline all light to a bright electric cyan and aqua. The white and pale pink pearl rows and the small white accent pixels go a cold blue white and become the crispest lines on the whole mat. Two things go dead under the lamp: the black field gives nothing back and reads as a flat dark navy black, and the brick red does not fluoresce at all, so the red S hooks, the red meander line and the red sawtooth selvedge sink back and stop competing with the greens. The fade survives the blacklight, which is worth knowing. The center column reads pure electric lime while the left and right thirds read a duller sage green, so the sunbeam is still legible with the lamp on.

Glow in the dark is a different property doing a different job, and it gives you a genuinely different picture rather than a dimmer version of the same one. Switch everything off and the hue information is gone, because everything that glows glows one color, phosphorescent green. The scroll vine and the medallion arabesques are brightest and read a strong chartreuse. The teal bands, the pearl rows and the sawtooth sit a step down at a deeper mid green, and the pearl rows survive as fine dotted lines. What goes dead is the more interesting half. The black field is fully black, and the brick red goes completely dark, so every red element becomes a gap: the S hooks drop out from between the scroll coils, the red meander line vanishes from under the teal one, and the outer selvedge reads as a row of loose green dots instead of a red and white sawtooth. The pattern in the dark is not the same pattern. One more expectation to set: the wet fade is nearly washed out under glow, just a slight brightness lift down the center column and no color difference at all, so the gradient that gives this colorway its name is essentially invisible with the lights off.