A Primer on Oriental rugs & Persian rugs

How do you know if a rug is a real handmade rug? If a salesperson tells you it is a Tabriz from Iran, is it? Rugs can be made from high quality wool or silk or from cheap materials. If you are being asked to pay thousands for a rug - is it worth it?

[The picture on the right shows how the fringe on a handmade rug should look - Photo from personal collection]

A rug seller can pay $300.00 for a Persian style rug, slap on a label that proclaims it to be a Tabriz, and put a $7,000.00 price tag on it. This same sales person will go into great detail about the effort put into the rug and the artistic background of the weavers who supposedly made the rug - but is it a true Fashan?

Go to this site to see some true Oriental rugs

The intent of this article is to educate you in some of the basic techniques for determining whether or not the rug you are contemplating buying is, in fact, what the salesperson is telling you it is. Break it down this way:

1. There are many low quality rugs on the market
2. There are many salespeople who do not know what they are selling
3. There are at least as many salespeople who do not care that they are selling low quality items - cheap rugs -for premium prices
4. This is not good for you
5. Learn all you can before you spend

From ancient times onward
The first rugs were probably made from flat leaved vegetable matter -reeds, for example. When woven together (one of top of the other and then under and then over again), reeds can be made into a rug of sorts.

Pictured on the right is the Pazyryk Rug - Public Domain photo

At the very least, this type of rug will provide some protection from a cold dirt floor. In addition to rugs of vegetable matter, rugs were made from the skins of large animals. Bear skin rugs are still popular in many parts of the world. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find ancient rugs since vegetable matter and animal skins will decompose over the years.

In 1949, an ancient rug, which came to be known as the Pazyryk Rug, was discovered in the Pazyryk Valley, in Siberia, by an archaeological team. The rug was found in the grave of a Scythian prince. Radiocarbon testing indicated that the Pazyryk rug was probably made in the 5th century BC. This rug measures approximately 9.3 by 6.5 ft. The advanced weaving technique used in the Pazyryk carpet indicates that the weaver had experience in this art. The Pazyryk Rug is considered to be one of the oldest rugs in the world.

People may have stumbled on the way to make knotted rugs over three thousand years old. When the technique for making knotted rugs developed several thousand years ago, it was a breakthrough. Not only did it result in sturdier rugs, it allowed for a much higher degree of ornamentation than was possible with earlier techniques.

Rug weaving is an ancient art form. It may take years for a weaver to finish a handmade rug. A rug's value partly derives from it being made by hand.

Click here for more information on rug sizes

Foundation of Rugs & Carpets:
The foundation of a rug is an important factor determining quality. The weft and warp are the foundation.

Wefts: The weft are the horizontal threads. Wefts are made of wool, cotton or silk. The color of the weft has nothing to do with the color of the rug. You can only see the weft on the back of a rug.

[A standard machine made rug. Note how exact it is. Compare it with the Hamadan handmade rug shown below]

Public Domain illustration

Warps: The vertical threads in a rug. Like the weft, they are made of cotton, wool or silk. The warp of the finished rug creates the fringe. Machine made rugs sometimes have fringes added to them to make the rug look more expensive.

Pile: the face of the rug. When the person making the rug ties knots he makes the pile. Valuable rugs have a tighter pile.

Weft goes left and right
Warp goes up and down.

The pile is the top of a rug - it's what you walk on

You can read more about Oriental rugs here
Wikipedia

And more about all sorts of Persian rugs here: Wikipedia Persian Rugs

"It is important to check everything that you can. And to know as much as you can because you do not want to over pay And you do want the best rug.

The problem is knowing who to trust. By learning as much as you can about rugs, you can protect yourself against those who are not as honest as they could be.

...what kind of a rug is it? Machine made rugs are fine if you pay a fair price for them. The problems creep in when you pay top dollar for a handmade rug that was really made by a machine.

The picture to the right shows the edge of a machine made rug.

Photo from personal collection

Note that the weft (threads that go right and left) and the Warp (threads that go up and down) are straight and exact. Also, note that the edge has been sewn on the main part of the rug.

There are three major ways that rugs are made today.

1. cheap rugs are made by machines


2. the next level are hand tufted rugs


3. the final level are handmade rugs

The concern is that you are asked to pay for a handmade rug while being offered one of lesser quality. So how do you tell the difference? There are a number of tests which you can perform to see what type of rug is truly being offered.

#1. The first test - is it handmade or made by a machine?

The first test is easy - put your thumb on the front side of the rug and your other fingers on the back side. Both sides should feel about the same. If the back feels rough, take a hard look at it. If you see a number of metallic lines on the back side and these lines are hard, you probably are looking at a machine made rug. The back of hand knotted, hand made, and hand woven rugs feel rough but not as rough as the back of a machine made rug.

#2. Test the fringe

Both handmade and machine made rugs may have a fringe. With the handmade rug the fringe is the end of the process. When the weaver gets to the end of the loom, the remaining material is tied off, this is what creates a fringe. Companies that make machine made rugs try to make the fringe effect by adding material and sewing the fringe on the rug. Look for this: Is the fringe sewn over the rug or was it added to the rug as a finishing touch? If it is sewn over, it is a machine-made. If it is extension of the rug, it is handmade. The construction of the machine-made rug is very different from the handmade Oriental rug. There is an overstitch pattern across the whole back of the machine-made rug. You cannot easily distinguish individual knots on the back of the machine-made rug because there aren't any--the overstitch construction is what holds the pile material in place. The fringe is clearly applied to the end of the machine-made rug after it's complete, whereas the fringe of the handmade rug is actually made up of the warp strings that come out of the end of the handmade rug.

Not all handmade rugs have a fringe. When you turn the rug over, you can see the knots and/or design. Looking at the reverse side of the rug above, you can see the knots are fairly even. In handmade rugs, the appearance of the knots and the design will be sporadic with slight variances. A machine made rug will show the equivalent of warp and weft extremely consistent throughout. When you see slight inconsistencies within the weave, more likely than not, the carpet has been made by hand. One of signs of a handmade rug are the inconsistencies of weaving which include minor mistakes in symmetry.

#3. Test the back

One of the best ways to tell if an area rug is handmade or not is to look at its back. Inspect the back closely when looking at weaves or knots. In handmade rugs, they are slightly uneven, a sign of imperfection while they look perfectly even in machine-made rugs. Regardless of how the rug was made, the more detailed and pronounced the design when looking from the back, the better the quality. It means there are more knots/weaves per square inch, therefore more durable and, if it is a handmade rug, it means it took a long time to make it. Looking at the back of any rug will reveal the knot structures. Machine made rugs have extremely regular knots and an even structure always identical in one part of the rug to another part. Handmade rugs all vary slightly due to the fact of slightly different tension on the wool as people hand tie the knots. It is similar to the way men's ties always look slightly different. If you place one finger on the front of a rug and your thumb on the back and pinch tightly a machine made will compress greatly and the sensation that your fingers seem to be going right through to the other side will result. Pinching most hand-knotted rugs you will feel much more body and substance. The sides and ends are another way to identify if a rug is machine made or hand knotted. Note how perfectly even the sides and ends of the machine made look as opposed to a hand-knotted which will be irregular and imperfect.

#4. Test for inconsistencies in the rug
Look to see if the rug has inconsistencies in knot height, and knot thickness. This will show up quickly since the horizontal and/or lines vertically will be imperfect. Fine, handmade rugs are made by people and people make mistakes. There are no inconsistencies in machine made rugs. People working on looms will apply different pressures - machines won't.

[This is a picture of a handmade Hamadan rug. Compare it with the machine made rug shown earlier]

#5 Testing wool quality
The quality of wool is difficult to assess without comparison - one of known wool content and one without. If a rug has a thick wool pile (1/2 inch or higher), this test is a good indicator of the quality of wool used. The purpose of this test is not so much to determine what type of wool your rug is made of, it is used to test the quality. This is called the "agitation method." In an area about 12" by 12", run across the pile vigorously back and forth a dozen times with both the tips of your fingers and open palm using a heavy and steady pressure forward and backward lengthwise on the carpet; both with and against the pile direction. Collect all of the wool which came off of the rug and roll the pieces into a ball. If the size of the sample is equal to or greater than the thickness of the actual rug, this shows that the rug is made of lower quality wool.

Is it really Silk?
If you are looking at a rug and are told that the rug either has silk on it or is wholly made of silk, you want to check to see if this is true. Here are some tests that will help you tell if it is real silk. Rugs made of, or contain, silk are very expensive. Cotton can be made to shine like silk - at least for a short time.

Real silk is produced the Asian or mulberry silk moth. The cocoon is spun by the silk moth out of a single silk fiber that can be up to several thousand feet long. Cocoons are boiled or heated to kill the silkworms, then unwound into single fibers which are put together and spun into thread or silk yarn.

Silk is extremely high in tensile strength, stronger than nylon. It has been estimated that if a single silk fiber the diameter of a pencil could be produced, the fiber could lift a modern jetliner. Silk is used to make Oriental rugs because dyed silk is a fiber with rich, saturated colors, and a distinctive, almost translucent luster.

First, a bit about artificial silk. Artificial silk is anything that people say is silk that really isn't. The most common material pushed off as real silk is mercerized cotton. Sometimes it is a manufactured fiber like rayon or a blend of chemically altered and/or manufactured fibers. Artificial silk is not a bad thing - it's just that the price of real silk is high and if someone is trying to tell you that it is real silk when it is something else - you are paying too much.

#6 The first test is simplicity itself - rub it. It nothing else it will tend to make the salesperson pay attention and he will think you know a bit about rugs. Rub your open palm across a part of the rug very quickly a number of times. Real silk should feel warm while artificial silk will feel cool. This may or may not be the best test and it is helpful if you have a real silk rug to compare the feeling with.

#7 The second test is to burn a part of the rug. Cut off a small part of the fringe or take a knot from the back; put the sample in a fire-proof container and burn it. Smell it as it burns - real silk is mostly protein and burning silk should smell like burning hair. The resulting ash should be black and crispy and the burning should stop quickly. If the material was made of rayon, the resulting ash would be soft and the smell would be more like the smell of burning paper - most paper is made of cellulose. In addition, it would continue to burn - not stop quickly.

The final test - #8. Did you do enough testing to be able to tell what you are buying?

I write a blog about rugs that you may enjoy reading. Take a look at my site on the Internet and let me know what you think about rugs and life in general. The blog can be found by clicking My Blog