Hopefully what will happen is another FANTASTIC “Rugs & Restoration Roadshow” event, this time at Winner’s Circle Training Center! If you are a Cleaning & Restoration Professional – this event is FREE to you due to the generosity of our sponsors, so get yourself registered (there will be NO entry without prior registration because we are approaching our limit of attendees). This qualifies for 1 CEC for IICRC cleaning and restoration certifications – can’t beat that!
The Rug Chick Blog Rug care education for oriental and area rugs.
- Written by Lisa Wagner
Tip of the Rug Spill Iceburg…
August 30, 2009 — therugchickMost woven rugs have wool knots tied around COTTON fibers for its construction. Cotton allows for a more consistent shape and construction as foundation threads (warps and wefts).
Take a look at any hand woven rug, and you can grab one single fringe tassel, and it literally runs all the way through the middle of the rug to the opposite side. The knots are wrapped around each of these warp strands.
Each cotton fringe tassel runs the entire length of this rug.
Most rugs have a cotton interior “skeleton” to them – and as we know, cotton is absorbent (it’s why we use it for our towels).
This means when you have a rug with a spill on it – what you can see on the surface is just the tip of the iceburg, especially if the spill is an acidic spill like juice, soda, coffee, tea, or the worst spill – pet urine or vomit.
This is bad... but it is just the tip of the iceburg.
Ideally, when you spill something on a wool rug, you go to blot it up immediately. Wool has a certain level of repellency to liquid so it does give a level of protection that allows you to grab a cotton towel and blot the spill up.
But when a spill is allowed to sit for awhile, and soak into the cotton interior, you have several problems as a result. It can cause color loss, stiffness of the area (and potential mildew and dry rot if left damp too long), odor, and also if the spill is food-related it can end up being a food source for a host of different insects.
With significant spills, of course the rug needs to head to a rug cleaning plant and given a bath in order to remove not just the contaminants in the surface wool fuzzy face fibers, but also to flush out what has been absorbed into the middle of the rug cotton foundation fibers.
Thorough cleaning like this cannot be done in the home, it can only be surfaced cleaned. The rug needs to be given a bath and by companies who know how to fiber test, dye test, and who have experience handling both woven and tufted rugs.
If you keep trying to clean an area on your rug, and it seems that the problem keeps coming back again and again – now you know why. You are treating the tip of the iceburg, and you need someone to help clean all of the contaminants that are lodged inside the middle of your rug.
- Lisa
Smokin' Hot Rug…
August 25, 2009 — therugchickDon’t know if you know this, but wool does not carry a flame. It is naturally fire resistant.
This does not mean that a super hot fire cannot engulf a wool textile, but an isolated flame will self-extinguish. This is good to know when you are choosing fabrics in your home, because inevitably fires do happen, and it’s best to not give it extra fuel. (When I watched a video of how quickly a Christmas tree can become an inferno in a home – literally seconds – I started buying small live trees instead of chopped down ones, it scared me that much.)
Once in awhile we get rugs with fire damage. With soot, smoke, ash, we can give the rugs a bath and remove much of the damage to put the rug in “pre-loss” condition.
Once in awhile though, it’s more than soot – it’s a burned hole. And even then, sometimes, the “impossible” is possible … like with this rug that a client believed headed to the trash heap:
Damaged to Done photos
This is the handy work of my mother Kate, a weaver, and the founder of our facility in San Diego. We have a repair team on staff to handle everything from the usual suspects (torn fringe from a vacuum cleaner to be replaced) to the more difficult projects like this fire damage order from the wildfires in San Diego.
When you have a home that has gone through the emotional devastation of a fire, and you’ve lost about everything, being able to save one thing… one piece of your former home… means a lot. So when we can make a small miracle with a rug like this, it creates one of those really happy moments in a company – when you know you’ve made a small difference in someone else’s world.
At our plant at San Diego Rug Cleaning Company, we love rugs. But we also love people, and it’s that mix that creates success in any business because it’s a mix that makes a difference.
- Lisa
This Rug Stinks.
August 21, 2009 — therugchickI am not the biggest fan of TUFTED rugs. Simply because I appreciate the art of a woven rug crafted by hand,versus the mass-market production of tufts of wool held together by latex and covered up on the back with material.
It’s cheaper to buy a tufted rug than woven, because of course the labor is a fraction of the time, but you also get what you pay for – a rug that lasts several years versus decades (or centuries) … a rug that is many times “disposable” because they simply do not last long.
And definitely not a rug to hand down to your children. But maybe you don’t mind that. You might be looking for something that looks nice, and maybe you have pets so you don’t want an investment piece of art on your floor, so it may be that a tufted area rug is exactly perfect for your needs and budget. I can understand that.
But what happens when the new tufted rug you bought stinks? I mean, literally STINKS? Like this one:
Some tufted rugs from India smell like dirty old socks and rubber.
Tufted rugs from India are getting a reputation for smelling bad. There appears to be a flaw in the curing process of the latex holding the rug together that off-gases an awful smell.
The purchaser may get a great deal on the rug and think that this can be washed to smell better – but they would be wrong, because the odor actually WORSENS with moisture. As of this date, none in my network has come up with a solution to this problem except to turn the rug away as uncleanable.
Some of these problem rugs have white material backing, and many I have seen have the blue backing shown in the photograph above. In my experience all have been from India, but not all India tufted rugs have this problem. And it may be that China or other countries produce tufted rugs with this particular problem, I just have not experienced it in anything other than tufted product from India.
What do you do?
When you go to buy a tufted rug, you grin open the fibers in the store and you SMELL the rug. If you notice a strong blend of dirty old socks with old tire rubber, then you have a problem. Do not buy the rug.
If you have recently bought a tufted rug, have closed up your house for a trip, and return to the strong pungent smell that makes your eyes water, then return the rug to the store. This is a manufacturing flaw, and the rug should be replaced. Then the retailer can ship it back to the factory and insist that they improve their manufacturing process.
And if you don’t want to deal with any potential odor problems like this, then buy a rug that is woven and does not use latex or glue to hold it together because it has been crafted beautifully by hand and does not require any adhesive to keep it together.
- Lisa
Rugs To Keep Out Of The Sun.
August 15, 2009 — therugchickA little sun never hurts, right?
Well, with rugs, that depends. Some rugs , you could put them in the sun for ages with no affect. While others can’t last even a few hours.
Take a look at this rug. It appears to be a nice beige Chinese sculpted wool rug. (They use a hand tool to carve out those floral designs.) These are plush rugs, with nice BRIGHT white fringe tassels.
Chinese rug - popular in the 1980s-90's and found in many homes.
This particular rug was cleaned by a professional cleaner – one who had cleaned this rug several times before over the years. But this time, he made the decision to put the rug into direct sunlight to dry it out. Something that normally would not be a bad decision – but with this particular type of rug, it was, because the rug USED to be not beige, but blue – take a look:
The original color can be seen on the back of the rug - pastel blue.
Many contemporary rugs are chemically washed with a chlorine-bleach solution before it is sent to market. This process can lighten up strong colors and because it strips scales off of the wool fibers to make them smoother, they reflect more light and appear “shinier.”
With certain rugs from China, and this particular type shown in the photos – the chemical processing is aggressive, and while it makes the rug very attractive, it also makes it very reactive to many things. It permanently stains very easily with acid sources (coffee. tea, soda, juice, and pet urine), it reacts horribly to any spot removers (coffee stain remover will strip color out completely), and it is VERY sensitive to sun fading.
This rug in the photos was only in the sun for a few hours, yet that color change was severe, and also not reversible. And I receive photos like these several times a month from cleaners who want to thoroughly dry a rug for a client, and end up having a surprise like this result.
I have not found any rug more reactive to sun that this type of Chinese rug, and it has a very distinct fringe style, a wide white fringe base, with a knot style that looks like a fist. Print the photo for your files so you can watch out for these in your cleaning business so that you don’t get yourself in trouble when you decide to place a rug in the sun.
- Lisa
How A Hooked Rug Can Hang You.
August 11, 2009 — therugchickThere is a horrible tendency by some contemporary American Hooked and Chinese Hooked rug manufacturers that is angering not only new rug owners, but also rug cleaners who try to serve these owners.
The rug looks innocent enough. Attractive, nice colors and floral design. Here is a hooked rug from China, typical looped construction on a mesh foundation, with a light latex and material backing.
Decent quality hooked rug - but EVERY one needs to be inspected.
The horrible tendency I am referring to is to stencil a rug’s design in heavy ink before beginning their hooking process. And the nightmare waiting to happen is when water touches this rug.
You see, though good rug dyes can be stabilized during the wash process in order to give the rug a good thorough cleaning, INK cannot be stabilized. And as some rug manufacturers become lazy in their quality control, they are using these inferior methods unaware of the problems they are creating in the goal of cutting corners.
Here is an American Hooked rug, just a few years old. It’s white and brown, with the brown testing as “colorfast” so a rug cleaner would then move ahead to properly wash it. But if you grin open the loops and look closely, you can see a problem waiting to be unleashed.
Dig deep into this rug to see the manufacturing flaw.
That is PINK ink that has been used to stencil the design elements of this hooked rug. Sometimes blue is used, or yellow. The problem is this is not permanent ink or dye, it is unfortunately water soluable.
The question then arises – if it is not permanent, how can you clean it?
The answer is – you can’t. Take a look at what happened to this rug, properly washed, but with the rug owner and the rug cleaner unaware of the rug’s fatal flaw.
Rug maker cutting corners = disposable rugs
If you’ve ever gotten ink on fabric, you know that is can be next to impossible to remove it, especially a lot of it. So you can look at this photo and see that this rug is heading to the landfill.
What could the rug cleaner who handled this rug have done differently? He dye tested, but the problem was UNDERNEATH the wool loops he tested. The only way he could have discovered the disaster looming in front of him would have been to pull open the loops enough to see the mesh it was hooked on.
By seeing the ink that lay right below those loops, his option would have been to turn the rug away as uncleanable, or to offer a surface cleaning to try to remove some of the soil from the surface of this rug without allowing any moisture at all to the foundation mesh with the large amount of ink in it.
If you’ve ever tried to wash your hair with no-rinse shampoo, then you have an inkling of what the results of cleaning a rug without a good wash process is. There is a high level of residue, and the agitation on a Hooked rug of scrubbing without water as a buffer can lead to fuzzing, pilling, and shedding.
The recommended process for cleaning rugs is a wet wash. Rugs have been given a bath for as long as rugs have been woven. Yet, this fatal flaw in some contemporary Hooked rugs means they cannot be properly or thoroughly cleaned.
If you have a rug on the floor for years, with feet, shoes, and paws walking all over it – wouldn’t you want to clean it? Of course you would. But in these cases, cleaning it the right way will ruin it.
Rugs with this type of stenciling in heavy ink make them a RUG TO RUN FROM. Buyers should look closely at the foundation of these rugs before paying good money to purchase them. Cleaners must look closely at these rugs to make sure they do not lose a rug – and a client – by simply doing their job.
This problem also occurs with some Tufted (material on the back) rugs. Tufted rugs can be stiffer construction, and harder to determine if stenciling exists. If there have been some spills on the rug, and PINK or BLUE ink is visible on the front or back in that spot, then this is a warning sign.
This tufted rug was in a flood damage, and you can see the pink and yellow ink throughout that has bled into the material backing.
Ink on the back of a tufted rug involved in a flood.
Because you sometimes cannot know for certain if this stenciling exists on a Tufted rug, I suggest that you dry these rugs face down if you see any ink that becomes visible at all during the wash.
This will make the dry time longer, so use additional air movers (I love the Dri-Eaz Airpath for this faster drying). If the ink wicks, by being face fiber side down the ink will absorb into the material backing and away from the front of the rug. You cannot guarantee to keep all of the ink on the back, but you will have a higher likelihood of having this happen.
If you are a professional rug cleaner, what do you tell the owners of new American and Chinese Hooked rugs, or these Tufted rugs?
You can tell them that a certain percentage of these rugs have heavy stenciling in ink and that this is a manufacturing flaw. If you can identify the stenciling, and it appears to be heavy, then recommend to the rug owner to return the rug for one that does not have this flaw (or a milder version of it).
Let them know that if any ink appears during the cleaning, that you will quickly finish your wash process and will extract and dry the rug face down in order to direct the ink to the backside of the rug. Let your client know that there may be ink on the back when you are done, but you will do all you can to keep it from the front side.
If your client is too nervous to have the rug cleaned, then they have no choice but to keep the rug thoroughly vacuumed, and soon buy a new one to replace it. Not cleaning a rug after several years is not an option, because it is unsanitary to wait longer than two years to clean a rug under normal use. Fibers of rugs (and carpeting) act as filters for the home, and just as with air filters, when they are full then need to be cleaned or replaced.
It has been my experience that about 10% of the hooked and tufted rugs I’ve seen have had this flaw of heavy ink stenciling. Many of these you may plan for a worst case scenario and not have a problem at all with.
Better to prepare for the worst. And if you see the glaring warning signs, let the rug owner know immediately that they need to return the rug because it is one to run from.
- Lisa
Tackling a Silk Rug in Tampa.
August 6, 2009 — therugchickJust had a GREAT workshop yesterday at Interlink Supply of Tampa with a full classroom of cleaning and restoration professionals. They came to spend the day learning some rug cleaning and identification guidelines, and handling rugs when they are involved in floods and fires. We also went into restoration marketing strategies and how to educate both consumers and insurance adjusters on the equipment and methods needed for handling the structural drying and contents cleaning of disaster work.
It was an energetic, and very knowledgeable group – great questions and dialogue back and forth.
And… one of the attendees brought us a “surprise” – a silk rug:
Here I am explaining the dangers of this silk rug.
This particular rug had a few issues that made it an interesting case study: 1) it had been cleaned several times with a dry-compound cleaning agent which had left a great deal of residue and yellowing in the ivory; 2) it had multiple pet stains and dye bleed of the blue in these areas; and 3) this rug is a BLEEDER – it tested “not colorfast” with our hot water quick test. (View my post on dye migration for the link to the video on how to properly test for colorfast versus fugitive dyes.)
We opted to stabilize the dyes with Bridgepoint’s Dye-Loc, then used a Hydramaster Dri-master hand tool to control the amount of moisture during rinsing the shampoo and extracting , and followed up with using the Dri-Eaz Airpath to speed up the dry time significantly.
Blue is one of the most difficult colors to strip in a rug to try to correct prior damage. Our goal was to clean the rug safely, without causing additional damage to the textile. This gave us the opportunity to show how to handle a rug “bleeder” and also how to handle silk rugs in general – from cleaning to grooming. Silk rugs tend to create more problems than wool rugs for professional cleaners, so giving them a proper good bath for cleaning often is not an option.
This was not an investment grade rug at all, but it was a good example of a commonly found silk blend rug in homes in this region. And it gave us the opportunity to talk about damage inevitably caused by pets on rugs, and some tricks of the trade to help you have success in cleaning rugs with multiple “danger” signs.
Off to Atlanta next… we’ve sold out the house (again!) – should be another fantastic group.
Thanks to Interlink for being our host, and to all of the professionals who took their day to come learn with us.
- Lisa
That Rug LIES! (Or it is lays…?) :)
August 1, 2009 — therugchickJust like Tammy Faye used a lot of makeup to cover up her “real” look to try to appear younger … certain rug dealers can use some “tricky” cover-ups to make a rug look OLDER. (Interesting, huh?)
Tea wash, henna wash, antiqued wash – these are the culprits.
It is a brown or gold dye, applied after the rug is woven, to give it a darker, older look. It can hide harsh strong dyes to make them more subtle. It can also hide past stains, flood damaged dyes, and other damage to make it appear un-damaged to the uneducated buyer. It can also be used to make a rug appear to be an antique to the uneducated buyer.
Or – it could simply be used to make the rug more attractive.
But here’s the problem – most of these applications are NOT permanent. So if a someone buys the rug, and gets it cleaned, it can suddenly lose the “look” that compelled them to buy the rug in the first place. (Usually they are not told the rug has been “tea washed” when they bought it. And honestly, many retailers handle too much product to know a wash warning sign like this – but rug cleaners, we need to catch it before we end up buying the rug ourselves from an unhappy client.)
Look at this rug:
Hmmm .. the color looks a little off.... (hint, hint!)
If you are running a conveyor belt cleaning operation – hundreds in and out a week - you might not catch these.
But when you run a hands-on workshop operation, where the teams inspect each rug closely, and then wash the rugs one at a time carefully, you will pick up on these dangers (and you can let the rug owner know there is a problem BEFORE it’s cleaned).
Grin open those fibers – what do you see?:
WOW! This rug was living a LIE! It's not antique, it's antiqu-ED!
When you clean a rug like this one, even if you are gentle, you will remove this over-dye process.
How do you spot the warning signs – as a rug CLEANER or as a rug BUYER? You compare the front to the back (any color differences?), you grin open the fibers (any color differences from the base to the tips?), you take a towel and dampen it and wipe the fibers (ANY color coming off onto the towel?).
You also look at the FRINGE to see if it is beige or brown instead of white. Usually they spray or dip the entire rug, and the cotton fringe will dye unevenly from that process.
If you like the look of a tea washed rug – then by all means buy it. But know that eventually this rug needs to be cleaned (at least once every 18 months under normal use, once a year for high traffic, that is IF you vacuum the rug regularly) and when it is cleaned it may lose some of this coloring process. It is not permanent, but some applications are better than others. Some are horrible and will come off with simply water.
Be aware that this means the color can also come off onto fabrics if you sit on the rug, and it may transfer to the carpeting underneath if you are placing the rug on top of wall-to-wall carpet.
As a cleaner – test the strength of the over-dye application and make the decision to move ahead with cleaning, or turn the job away if the rug owner will not release you from liability on cleaning their tea-washed rug. Your cleaning process is not doing damage, the application process is the problem.
Makeup will only cover up spots so long … eventually you have to show the “real” you … and eventually these rugs need to be the rugs they were “born” to be. Just be wary of the cover-ups!
- Lisa
P.S. Since you’re here anyway… why not post a comment? I’d like to know if you like my posts, or if you don’t, or if there is anything you’d like me to share some insight on. Come on! It’s fun! 