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Friday, October 3, 2014

The Process of Carpet Weaving

The Process of Carpet Weaving  All handmade oriental rugs, whatever contemporary or antique, Persian, Turkish, Chinese or Indian, are made essentially in the same way: on a loom, vertical or horizontal, on which warp threads are stretched. Wefts are added across the warps and between them are knots, short bits of yarn, wool or silk, placed there by the artisans. Weft- knots-weft so the rug grows.


Pattern are created following cartoons attached to the warps facing the knotters. These provide design details and color selection. In tribal and village oriental rugs the weavers work from memory using traditional designs with individual variations. Thus no two handmade carpets are exactly alike.

In the rug weaving process edges and ends are finished to give the fabric additional stability. The roughly cut pile ends are trimmed after the piece is removed from the loom to give a regular even face.

Dyes and Dyeing

Color is the outstanding characteristic of an oriental rug, whatever it is a room size or oversize carpet, scatter rug or runner or a luxurious silk rug for the wall. The pattern yarns, either wool or silk are dyed by professionals in urban contexts using, for antique pieces, dyes derived from plands and insects. In rustic rug weaving the colors are dyed by the weaver herself.

In modern carpets the dyes are usually synthetic: the better the carpet, the better the dyes. In the most contemporary pieces, there has been a trend back to natural dyes for their richness and variation. Natural and synthetic dyes may appear in the same hand made carpet.


Synthetic indigo, for example, is chemically equivalent to natural indigo and may be used to equal advantage. Variation in any and colour is called “abrash” and is generally sign of natural dyes. >The Process of Carpet Weaving<

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