Carpet Cleaning
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Rug materials and Preperation
Rug pile is usually made from wool, which will vary in quality. Early rugs such as Safavid use soft, high quality wool, whilst Caucasian and Turkish rugs often use harsh and fairly coarse wool. More sumptuous rugs are often made of silk and is used in smaller quantities to embelish Turkoman, Caucasian and Turkish rugs.
Cotton is often used for finer detail in Indian and early Safavid rugs, Ghiordes rugs, Ottoman Bursa rugs and Turkoman Saryk rugs. It will mainly be used in its natural form, although in Bursa rug construction cotton is dyed blue. Some Safavid rugs have silver gilt or silver thread wrapped on a silk core, this is also found in later Turkish rugs like Koum Kapu and Hereke.
In nomadic and Turkish rugs, wool is exclusively used for the warp, with none of the fibres dyed, which are spun very tightly, colours are often dark.
Ushak and Transylvanian rugs have adopted an end dip technique, with the warp ends becoming the rug fringes, these are often dyed red and yellow, with the weft being loosely plied wool, although cotton is sometimes used particularly in Caucasian rug creation.
Weft areas are usually dyed in Turkish rug construction, with red being the dominant colour. Early Safavid rugs use tightly spun silk warp with the weft loosely spun in silk. Indian and Persian warps that were made of silk were eventually replaced by mill spun warps made from cotton.
Later Indian rugs were often coarse using jute as the weft material, although generally we have seen an increase in the use of cotton, which is often dyed, but not in the manufacture of rugs like Herez, Tabriz and Kashan, silk is always used as a foundation. Hamadam town rugs, which are also coarse will use a home spun cotton.
