Oriental Rug Cleaning Service Oriental Rug Cleaning Service

How to Identify a Handmade Rug

When a customer trusts UCM Carpet Cleaning of DC with their rug, we take that trust seriously. Handmade Oriental Persian rugs are valuable investments and can last for decades when cared for properly. To clean a rug safely and completely, we need to know a little bit about it, especially since not every oriental rug is handmade.

Call us the rug detectives. Before we start cleaning your rug, we examine the pile for fiber type and look carefully at the rug's construction. It takes a little bit more time, but the effort is worth it to make sure we take the best care of your rug.

Check the Fiber

The majority of handmade rugs have wool pile, though some of them may be silk instead. Silk pile looks very different from wool, and more care should be taken with silk as it is more delicate.

A good rule of thumb is that if the pile of the rug is acrylic or any other fiber other than wool or silk, it isn't handmade.

The warp and weft of a rug can be a different material than the pile. When you see a 100% wool rug, it means that the pile is 100% wool, but the warp threads may be cotton, and the weft could even be a third fiber. For handmade carpets, the warps are the threads on the loom that make up the foundation of the rug, and the wefts are the thin woven rows holding a row of knots in place.

Knotted or tufted?

You might have heard rugs described as hand-knotted or hand-tufted. Really, hand-tufted rugs aren't made by hand, except that a hand holds the tufting tool. The tufting tool helps the rug maker quickly insert the pile into a pre-made foundation, and the pile is then later secured by a latex backing. So the best way to tell a hand-tufted rug from a hand-knotted rug is to look at the back.

Does the pattern on the back of the rug seem as detailed as the front? Then this is a hand-knotted rug, as the backs of the knots are visible on the back of the rug, duplicating the pattern of the rug's pile.

Is Your Rug Handmade? Oriental Rug Cleaning

Look at the Fringes

In a handmade rug, the fringes that you see are actually the ends of the warps of the rug, and are important to maintain so that your rug doesn't unravel. Machine made rugs may also have fringes, but they are fringes that were attached to the rug after the fact, to simulate the appearance of the natural warp threads.

No matter your rug type, UCM Carpet Cleaning of DC takes exquisite care of your rug. Call now to schedule your rug cleaning in our dedicated facility. Pickup and delivery is on us!

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