[5] The collection consists mostly of textile panels, cushion and bed covers from the Scania region of southern Sweden, dating in the main from a hundred-year period between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries.

[7] Employment in Scania was mainly in farming,[8] and the early eighteenth century was a time of relative peace and prosperity for farmers, with far fewer epidemics than previously.

[6] The creation of a dowry was an important tradition, and for each wedding the bride would demonstrate her skill by creating unique textiles with symbolic decorations.

[27] A textile creator would rarely venture beyond her own village, so her imagery would have been drawn from nature and from local superstition and religion.

For thousands of years, textiles had been traded across Europe and Asia, and pictorial designs from the Near East are known to have been imported to Sweden by the fourteenth or fifteenth century.

[3] The hundred art works in Khalili collection show the variety as well as the skill of Swedish textile artists.

[27] Very common motifs are people, animals or birds within octagons or circles, and most permutations of creature and geometric shape are represented in the collection.

[27] Five objects in the collection depict prancing, open-mouthed deer within octagons, which is the most prized design for Swedish textiles.

[29] An interlaced knots motif, found it many kinds of decorative art, is exemplified by embroidered works and a knotted-pile cover in the collection.