Rug dealers as a “group” get a bad rap.

Everyone has heard a story, or seen an exposé, on someone being ripped off on a rug purchase. They were sold an “antique”…when it wasn’t. Or they were sold a silk rug…when it was actually viscose or mercerized cotton.

It’s an industry that is similar to the “carpet cleaning” industry in that it’s a small percentage of unethical bad apples that ruins the reputation of the group at large. And just as not every cleaner is a bait-and-switch operation, neither is every rug dealer a bait-and-switch retailer. There are great retailers selling great textiles out there.

Beautiful Persian rugs for sale.

When I hear a “horror” story on a rug it usually comes down to this one factor – that the buyer did not get any education on what they were buying beforehand. So they were at the mercy of the rug villain.

Whose fault is that exactly? Yes the scheming dealer saw the person as a mark…

…but the buyer should not have been a “mark” in the first place.

So this is a post to help educate rug buyers out there in some of the basics of a “good” rug. This is based on my experience of growing up with parents in the rug business (selling antique rugs) and with my mother and brothers and team running a rug washing and repairing facility today in San Diego.

Me and my mom Kate.

This gives me the retailer perspective (and it is hard work to run a retail shop today…especially in California) and also gives me the perspective of the caretaker of these textiles, so I know the bad fibers and dyes and manufacturers to avoid.

So if you are looking to buy a rug, and truly are starting from ground zero and are nervous about it, here are some guidelines that I hope will help you feel like a more confident consumer.

Rug Buying Tips For Nervous Rug Shoppers:

1) Find the right COMPANY.

Just over a decade ago you found woven rugs only in galleries. Today you find them all over the place, and all different qualities. Especially now that synthetic rugs and inferior goods have moved into our market, and they are getting good at making a lot of low quality area rugs, it’s getting tough to know what’s worth paying for and what is a complete waste of money.

A mass market budget store is not going to be selling high quality merchandise in rugs. If you are looking to buy a quality rug for your home, and you are looking in Home Depot or Lowes or Costco, you are not going to find them there.

But you knew that already. =)

They may have some good commodity rugs to use in places you need a rug to get beat up in. I have a couple wool tufted rugs that I use as entry mats because wool is great at grabbing and hiding soil, and lasts longer than synthetic fibers. I like my woven wool rugs too much to make them my entry rugs. They are my rug friends, much older than I am, and I just respect and enjoy them too much for putting them at the front door.

So, if you are looking for rugs of quality, with great colors and character, you are going to find these in several places:

=> Rug Galleries: Yes there are still galleries that sell only hand woven oriental rugs around. New and antique textiles. The stores who are perpetually running “going out of business sales” need to be avoided. This is where flawed merchandise is trucked in for a “tent sale” to move items that were not good enough to sell to begin with. This is absolutely an area to ask around for who others refer to you as a good company.

A good place to ask who to buy from is your local rug cleaners. We cleaners see new and old rugs, hundreds and hundreds a week, and we absolutely know what the good rugs are and what the garbage is. So ask your trusted cleaner who they think is good to buy from.

A peer of mine, Barry O’Connell, has a list of some of the rug dealers he knows and trusts across the US. If you are in the San Diego area (my town!), a great gallery to visit is Prospect Rug Gallery in La Jolla for “real” investment grade oriental rugs. And if you ever find yourself in Jacksonville, Florida, the most amazing gallery of rugs and art I’ve ever been to is Mussallem Galleries. You must add it to your trip, it’s worth the visit, trust me.

My niece Katie (when she was little) with a little Navajo weaving.

=> Furniture & Flooring Stores: Rugs “finish” or can “make” a room, so you will see with stores that specialize in furnishings, or specialty hard floors, that they also carry rugs. These stores do not have the staff research that 100% rug stores have, so they may have rugs that look good but are not high quality. With tips later in this post on determining quality you will be able to make a good choice, but you can often find good rugs in some of these better quality furniture and flooring stores. You just need to know what you are looking at.

=> Antique Stores & Consignment Stores: You will often come across some real treasures in some of the hole-in-the-wall antique shops and consignment stores in your town. Often the owners are not knowledgable on rug quality, or pricing, and you can sometimes get great rugs here at good prices as well. But I personally just love to find new places to go “discover” hidden rugs that are beat up, dirty, and that I know I can bring back to life back at our shop.

1930's Fette Chinese rug and hand crank antique washtub wringer I found at a local antique shop.

2) Find the right RUG.

A rug is only as good as the ingredients and skill that went into making it, so if you are looking for a quality rug you want to see good fibers, good dyes, and good construction.

FIBERS: The good, the bad, and the ugly.

The best fiber for rugs is by far wool. It is the strongest, most vibrant, and most resilient fiber to be walking on. A low quality wool rug will outlast the best synthetic fiber (nylon, acrylic, polyester, olefin) all day long. Plus wool is fantastic at hiding dust and soil, so it also looks cleaners and better longer than other fibers.

Wool is the best fiber for rugs.

Wool is also the only true “green” choice if you are trying to save the world =), because it is a truly sustainable resource (sheep replenish the supply annually!). All of the synthetic options are made from petroleum by-products (i.e. they are plastic).

That said, there are some inferior qualities of wool. The lesser quality wool feels more brittle, and it breaks and sheds. Rub your thumb over the wool and see if it has a smooth but firm feel, or if instead it feels more like “straw.” Brittle wool can be due to inferior breeding in the sheep, or wool that was sheared from ill or dead sheep. It can also be due to heavy chemical processing that has made it “lifeless.” But on the whole, there is a lot of really good quality wool rugs out there.

Silk is also an excellent – but pricy – fiber for weaving some amazing rugs. This is an area where I will see the most “rip-off’s” of people trying to pass off inferior “wild” silk blended with rayon/viscose as the real deal.

Quality silk rugs have a high knot count, vibrant colors, and a thin pile.

Silk fibers are strong (not as strong as wool fibers are in terms of being walked on), but I have always had a problem with silk rugs being used on the floor. With silk textiles sometimes having as many as 1500 knots per square inch, truly incredible detail, I like to see them mounted on the walls as tapestries rather than having feet, shoes, and paws all over them. But that’s me. =) Since many silk rugs will bleed when spilled on, we take the risk?

Reference past posts on real silk rugs and also fake silk rugs, for more tips on identifying the quality silk merchandise and the lemons that are “rugs to run from.” Viscose rugs are truly the worst rug choices out there right now, you can read why on my past post: “Viscose rugs are garbage.”

There are trade-offs depending on what you are after. If you want cheap rugs to put on the floor, you are going to be buying synthetic fibers. The trade off is they are not as nice looking, and they “ugly” faster because they do not hide soil as well as natural fibers do so you will be cleaning them more often.

Here is an acrylic (synthetic) Tabriz design rug:

Acrylic machine made Tabriz design rug.

Now… this acrylic rug was made in Iran. Machine made, and synthetic fiber, but given the “Tabriz” design I can guarantee that the person who purchased it was told “this rug was made in Iran, it’s a Tabriz” and technically that rug dealer would not be lying. And the owner may have paid believing they purchased a Tabriz (a well known hand weaving city) that would have resale value down the road. But this one is not worth much at all. Synthetic fiber rugs never are.

Here’s a “real” Tabriz corner, a wool rug that is hand woven in Iran. (Note the rich colors and sheen, you do NOT get those colors in synthetic plastic fibers.)

Tabriz hand woven wool rug.

I lump FIBERS into 3 broad categories: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

GOOD = natural fibers (wool, silk, cotton).

These are the strongest, best to dye, and best to walk on fibers. They will also be what is used in hand woven rugs, which will tend to be your more valuable rugs to own. You will also see wool used in the higher quality machine woven rugs like Karastan.

BAD = synthetic fibers (nylon, olefin/polypropylene, acrylic, polyester).

These are the “fake” rugs that are trying to look like wool but are a poor substitute. You should buy these only if you know they are cheap product and you need a rug that you consider “disposable” after a few years.

UGLY = crummy rug fibers (rayon/viscose, sisal, jute).

These are fibers that really are a horrible choice to use as a rug. Rayon and viscose fibers are weak, they yellow, they bleed, and they shed. Sisal and jute you can’t have spills on because they release oils and discolor in a way that is truly tough to correct without using some bleaching agents. We often turn away sisal rugs as “un-cleanable” because the rubber they like to glue on the back, and the fabric binding they like to border the rugs with, are all cleaning headaches.

DYES: The good, the bad, and the ugly.

With dyes in terms of what is “good” and what is “bad” besides whether they are visually appealing to you is whether or not they are colorfast.

I lump DYES into 3 categories: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

GOOD = colorfast dyes.

These can be natural or synthetic dyes. It’s tough to “test” dye stability in a store. You can take a close look at the back and look for any visible dye migration already there as many rugs have been chemically washed  before going to market. You can also take a handkerchief and get it damp to test for any “easy” migration. Ideally, if you can take the rug out on consignment, you can do a proper dye test. If the transfer in the “test” is very slight (just a hue of color), then this is a strong dye, especially if the test was done with hot water as the video shows.

BAD = fugitive dyes.

These are the dyes that are not colorfast. So if you spill on them, they will bleed. It may be that the dyes are not strong quality, or it may be that the fibers have “excess” dye in them due to not being thoroughly rinsed before the weaving process. We see this sometimes in tribal rugs (like American Indian weavings or rugs from war-torn Afghanistan where water resources may be scarce). If the issue is “excess” dyes, then the first thorough washing will help remove this extra dye.

Testing the dye of an Afghan tribal wool rug.

When I say the dyes are “bad” this means either the original dye processing was not exceptional, or there were steps skipped during the production (like the lack of thorough rinsing away of excess dye). It is my experience that rug makers do not cut corners in just one area. Usually poor quality fibers are matched with poor quality dyes and poor quality construction. So a warning sign in this area of dyes is a trigger to look at the rug even closer before you buy it.

UGLY = over-dye treatments.

Some rugs are “colored” after they are woven. One popular treatment is “tea wash” over-dyeing. This is similar to a wash-in dye for your hair. It gives you color that washes out over time. You often see a sign of this treatment on the fringe, that instead of being white it’s beige.

Tea washed rug has beige fringe that is "blotchy."

Some tea wash treatments are better than others, just like some hair dyes are stronger than others. It’s important to do a dye test to see what the quality of the rug is you are looking at. If the test shows little or no transfer, then yours will last years and through several washings. But some others are obviously bad jobs:

Bad tea wash treatment.

Sometimes tea wash treatments are used to hide past damage or flaws, especially past dye bleeding or stains, so carefully inspect the back of the rug to look for any flaws.

The other UGLY dye is the practice of some unscrupulous rug merchants to sell rugs that have been colored with ink. Some use India Ink to darken areas of wear to disguise them, or to blend away past stain damage (like pet urine stains).

The problem with ink is that it cannot be stabilized when cleaning, and so this will bleed all over the rug when washed. When purchasing an older rug, ask the rug dealer if there are any areas that have been dyed or colored. If he does not point any out to you, then have it written on the invoice as well, just to reinforce his commitment to you on that point. Then if anything ugly happens, you have a course of action to get your money back if you were lied to.

But even skilled rug eyes can sometimes miss the work being done by someone to intentionally hide damaged areas. Being able to take the rug on consignment and do a dye test (or have the rug dealer do a test in front of you at his shop) can show you any areas that may be painted.

One more point on this. This is “ugly” when it is not revealed to you in advance. Then it is meant to hide something that has devalued the rug you are looking at. However, with older rugs with worn areas, it may not be possible or financially feasible to reweave those areas and so repairs involving some dyeing and repiling is not unethical – it’s a way to support and protect those worn areas, while also making it look better.

What is unethical is NOT disclosing that work to you and implying that the rug is all original.

When you have a rug that is a hundred years old, it is expected to have wear and some “signs of age” (we all do!). But if a rug has been heavily painted, it will be a problem to have on the floor and used. If you are not sure of the condition of the rug you want to purchase, always consider getting an opinion from your trusted rug cleaner.

He/she will not be able to tell you value of the rug (that is the appraiser’s job), but cleaners can absolutely point out any problems with fibers and dyes in regard to it being used on the floor, and eventually being cleaned. It’s our job as cleaners to protect and maintain textiles, so we know what to look for as hidden dangers.

Patchwork rug, with pieces over-dyed in ink that comes off with spills and with cleaning.

Ink is a problem. In this rug above small squares of hand woven flatweaves are made into a patchwork rug, which is a really cool idea (we often make remnants of rugs into pillows) – but what is NOT cool is the excessive ink being used to color some of the squares. You can see spills on this rug where the ink has been wiped away and off. This will be a nightmare of ink if gotten wet by an untrained rug cleaner, and these rugs are selling for a lot of money likely without letting the buyer know that the ink can bleed as easily as it can (even underneath on to the floor under it).

It’s a situation where designers like the “look”…but have no idea of the dangers they are giving to their clients who buy the rugs they recommend.

I find that rug owners who are told that their rug is not cleanable get a bit upset that they were not told of this problem when they purchased their rug. So let’s talk about rug construction types, because I find that today rug owners are not being informed on the different types of rug constructions and why some are better than other – that they are only focusing on the “look” of the rug.

RUG CONSTRUCTION: The good, the bad, and the ugly. 

When you are purchasing a rug, I think it’s important that you know everything up front so that you can make an educated buying decision. Let’s keep with the same three categories, these are general groupings, obviously there are more detailed choices within each of these groups.

GOOD = woven rugs.

When I get a call about a rug to clean, I ask them if the rug is woven. If they say they do not know, then I ask them to flip over the corner of the rug. If they can see the design on the back the same as the front, it is woven. It may be hand woven, or machine woven, but it is woven nevertheless. And woven rugs, especially wool ones, should be washed professionally.

Flip the corner. If you see the design on the back - it is a woven rug.

To determine if the rug is hand woven or machine woven, takes a bit more skill (and determining what country it was woven in takes a great deal more skill…), but the basic rule of thumb is hand woven rugs have the “knots” tied around the warp threads – and those warps make up the fringe tassels.

Hand woven rug - wool fibers are wrapped around the warps. Those cotton strands running vertically make up the fringe tassels.

With machine woven rugs the tufted are wrapped around thick weft strands, and the fringe is typically sewn on afterwards with a sewing machine, and the sides are machine surged as well.

Machine woven rugs have the wool wrapped around the wefts (wefts run "weft" to right). Fringe is sewed on by machine and sides sewn on too.

From a construction standpoint, both hand woven and machine woven rugs, with good fibers (wool!) and good dyes, are going to be good rugs. The hand woven will obviously be a higher price, which we will address in the next section, purely due to the labor involved. But if you are looking for a sturdy good rug that is going to last you, you want to look for a woven rug.

BAD = tufted and tufted-hooked rugs.

If you flip the corner of your wool pile rug and see a material backing, then you have a tufted rug.

Tufted wool rug from India. The material hides latex holding it together.

Tufted rugs are what I call “fake” rugs, because they are constructed to create the look of a woven rug from the top, but they are actually made using a lot of shortcuts. The reason there is a material back is because the wool tufted are punched into a canvas with a tufting gun, and latex is poured all over the back to hold it together. There are a host of issues that can come up with tufted rugs related to their construction, the most important being they do not last anywhere near as long as woven rugs do under normal use.

Tufted rug with the backing material removed.

Tufted rugs can be quite decorative. And some do in fact use good quality wool and dyes. The issue is with that latex, which besides being ugly (that is why it’s covered up with material), can have a tendency to delaminate, crumble, and powder.

Tufts are simple loops so when the latex crumbles the tufts fall away easily.

Tufted rugs are to real woven rugs as particle board furniture is to real wood furniture.

IKEA sells a ton of particle board furniture. It’s nice looking, it’s easy to put together, and it’s cheap to buy. But no one is thinking about passing on those pieces to their children down the road, because they know they will not last, and will not have any resale value.

Likewise, many stores are selling tufted rugs. The problem is, many buyers are not aware that they are buying “particle board” quality merchandise, and they are not aware of the challenges that come up with these rugs.

Tufted rugs MUST be placed on a hard floor, because if it is placed over a soft floor (carpet) and furniture is placed on top of it, that latex will crack and break at those points of furniture. Sometimes a heavy pad will help avert this problem, otherwise the rug will get buckling and fiber loss over time.

Tufted rugs are VERY tough to remove pet urine and odor out of it. Once the urine penetrates the glue, your chances of getting the odor out is low. Full washing is the only way to get the contamination out, but tufted rugs by their very construction do not hold up well to long soaking to remove odor causing contaminants.

Tufted rugs with STRONG odors when they are new are flawed, contaminated merchandise. Sometimes lower quality tufted rugs from India have a bad odor that is like a mix of strong rubber and smelly socks. This is a sign of the latex souring before it was applied, or being mixed with bad contaminated filler, and this odor is NOT removable. Take the rug back for another one.

When people ask me what kind of rug they should buy, and they have pets or children who will be rolling on the rugs, I always direct them to getting woven rugs. No matter how much the makers of tufted rugs tell me the odors are “safe,” I know that when my nose tells me “YUCK” that something is not good. I would not let my kids roll around on tufted rugs.

And with pets, any accidents on that glue will lead to you likely having to buy a new rug, so unless the tufted rug is really cheap, I’d get a woven rug you can wash fully when you need to. (Or give your pets a nice backyard instead.) =)

That said, if you like the tufted rug you are looking at, and it’s the price you want to pay, and you don’t have pets, then go ahead and buy it…especially if it is wool. Like I mentioned before, I have some tufted wool rugs that I use as entry rugs, and they take the abuse well and I don’t have to feel guilty about having my hand woven nice rugs taking that beating. Tufted rugs absolutely serve a purpose in some cases. (Just don’t let anyone sell you a new tufted rug at a woven rug price, because that is wrong.)

UGLY = custom and crazy rugs.

Decorators and designers like to come up with great “unique” custom creations for rugs involving all fibers and fabrics imaginable. We are seeing today lots of “shag” rugs made of acrylic, polyester, wool, and leather.

Leather strip shag rug. Very tough to clean.

The toughest pieces are the “frankenstein’ed” custom rugs where a maker pieces together incompatible fibers or fabrics that each require different cleaning chemistry and methods.

Natural and synthetic fiber mix, and a poor backing construction.

Often these rugs need to be cleaned section by section to not create any disasters, and this often takes more time and will cost the owner more money. We charge extra to clean shag rugs like this one:

Shag rugs are tough to clean, and cost extra.

If any of you own shaggy hair dogs, you know how tough it is to both clean and brush that fur. It’s no different with rugs, except that while you may be cleaning your dog monthly, you usually only clean your rug once a year, so that shag gets super dirty…

…and tangly. These rugs need to be cleaned row by row, and with the new synthetic polyester shag rugs, you literally have to “pick” the lint and grime off the tufts because it gets caught up in the plastic weave.

Many of these new pieces being sold today we are turning away because it’s easier to have them buy a new rug when it gets super soiled versus them paying for our labor hours to clean the rug for them.

It may have looked like a cool design to begin with, but if you can’t easily clean it, it can become a costly “cool” purchase. If you are planning on making a designer rug purchase, you might take a quick photo and send it to your cleaner and just make sure it is cleanable first. Just to be safe.

So again, I’m partial to woven rugs, because they are the easiest to care for, and they last the longest.

And the question comes to this… you are looking at a rug, and you know it’s woven (because you see the design on the back same as the front), so is it a good price?

3) Find the right PRICE.

 ”What should I pay for an oriental rug?” is a question I get a lot. Especially from my clients getting ready to travel overseas on a trip to weaving countries.

The prices of rugs are all over the place. Over the past few months I’ve seen in our rug shop a rug that a client paid $200 for, and another who paid $200,000 for hers.

Rugs are like real estate, and the prices are based on location, quality, age, and how badly others want it too.

Photo by Temple Rugs & Cultural Tours, used with permission. 3 DOBAG weavers crafting a Turkish rug by hand. www.templerugs.com.au

This hand woven rug will take 3 Turkish weavers approximately a year to weave a 9×12 rug. When people ask me why some new rugs are “so much” I ask them how much they would charge me to craft something 6 days a week for 12-14 months. Hand woven rugs are a piece of someone’s life, and to those of us who appreciate that type of artistry, we do not see the prices as “so much.”

When someone is traveling and asks me what to spend what I tell them is if the rug is wool, and they look at the back and see that it IS indeed woven, then if the price is $10 per sq. ft. – buy it.

A woven wool rug, even if it is not high quality, will be worth at least $10 per square foot. You will either be getting a fair price on new merchandise if the quality is “average” and a great price if the quality is great.

Without me seeing the rug, it’s hard to give a blanket price, but you are always safe at that $10 mark.

Now, there are MANY rugs selling for hundreds per square foot, including the rugs woven by the Turkish weavers you saw above, and these will be the rugs being sold in the higher-end quality rug galleries. But if you are traveling to random “rug sales” or searching antique stores for hidden treasures or want to buy a rug when you are traveling abroad, that is a good price to hold in your head if you are scared about getting “ripped off.” You can’t get ripped off at ten bucks a square foot.

That said, value will always be in the eye of the beholder.

We often get rugs in that “appraisers” would place no value on because it’s not “collectible” or has no real “market value” in today’s market.

But when I look at a rug, I can see the workmanship that goes into these creations, and I always see value where others may not.

I have an old Peking rug (circa 1915) on my wall at home. I know an appraiser would not place much value on it because it has some significant areas of wear. Heck, it’s a century old!

Peking rug. I like it... and that's all that matters. =)

But what I love about “my” piece is that it’s from a period in Chinese weaving before they began creating a lot of commodity rugs that were heavily chemically washed. Back then they used the best indigo dyed wool, and I am a huge fan of indigo.

So when I see the rug, it makes me smile. It’s about a hundred years old, and it still shines like it always has, and I love to look at it.

And that’s what you are looking for when you buy a rug, that type of connection. It means something to me that this rug was crafted entirely by hand. All of the rugs I have in my home I have because they have “character” – they are my woven friends. Some have some wear, some damage, and some flaws…

…but so do I, so it’s okay. I don’t need perfect rugs, I just want “real” rugs that have lived a “real” life that I can surround myself with and appreciate.

Having hand crafted items, whether textiles or art or fabric or pottery or furniture, that’s just part of what I appreciate. It reflects on what I admire and appreciate in the artisans of this world, and their past work.

If you don’t  really “like” rugs, and could care less what is on your floor, then you have a whole host of places to find inexpensive, and lesser quality rugs – Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, Home Depot, Lowes, lots of places.

Just keep an eye out on the fiber, dye, and latex problems I noted before to keep yourself from buying a rug that may end up costing you more down the road in cleaning or repairs than you planned for. It’s not uncommon for us to have to completely relatex some tufted rugs from India within a few years after their purchase because they are crumbling, and this is a repair that costs a few hundred dollars.

India tufted rug. It is delaminating and putting powder on the floor. These get messy over time.

If you do “like” rugs, then focus on the different woven rugs you come across to discover what types appeal to you the most. If the rug you are looking at is more than the $10 mark I’ve given you (and if you are in a quality store with true quality goods you absolutely will be paying more than $10), then you want to learn more about the rug.

- How does the wool feel? Is it smooth but strong? (Brush over it with your thumb to see if it is brittle or sheds.)

- How do the dyes look? Are they vivid? Is there a big difference in the colors from the front to the back (sun fade may be a sign of inferior dyes)? Do the colors test as colorfast?

- How is the shape of the rug? No rugs are perfectly rectangular, but make sure the rug does not have any glaring weaving flaws that are causing buckling.

- How does the rug look when you walk around to both ends? Every rug has a “light” and “dark” direction, so take a look from all angles to truly get the richness of its look.

- How does the back of the rug look? Do you see any flaws in the weaving tension that are creating creases? Do you see any areas of discoloration or past dye bleed? Are the sides or ends unraveling?

- How old is the retailer telling you the rug is? Take a photo so you can research the rug’s origin on-line, or take the rug out on approval so you can hire an appraiser to verify the rug if it is being sold to you as an “antique” if the price is significant and to verify you are buying an investment grade rug.

- Are there any “care” conditions you need to be aware of? Take the rug out on approval to show your trusted cleaner to see if they see any issues with the fibers, dyes, or construction. (When clients bring us rugs we ask them to NOT tell us who the rug dealer is so that we can give our feedback without getting involved in the middle of a potential sale. Do not get your cleaner in the middle either because if the sale does not happen this may lead to bad blood and the cleaner may stop offering his two cents to help.)

Beautiful old Kuba Kilim with a great Navajo under it.

It comes down to whether you feel good about the price you are paying, whether it is $200 or the $200,000. You want to be able to walk into your room, see that rug, and just feel really good about it. And if you know it’s good wool (or silk), good dyes, and good woven construction, and it was in the budget you had for the piece, and you like the person who sold it to you…

…then it’s worth what you paid for. Even if others would not pay that for it.

Hope this gives you some things to look for when you are rug shopping so that you don’t have to feel nervous about going into a rug store.

Happy Rug Shopping!

- Lisa

P.S. If you want to expand your education on oriental rugs, some great websites to visit are Emmett Eiland’s Oriental Rug Blog, Barry O’Connell’s resource website,  Hali Magazine’s website (awesome magazine to subscribe to – BEAUTIFUL rugs in every issue), the Rug Rag, great site on tribal rugs Nomad Rugs, and a fantastically written historical rug blog Tea and Carpets.

(WARNING: Once you get the “rug bug” you will not be the same. =) And once you get to recognizing rugs you enjoy, you may become a collector with a hobby that may get expensive. But, I can tell you as someone who truly loves textiles and the creation of them, it’s a fun world to be a part of. And thankfully I have appreciation for the hand crafted rugs with character that don’t cost me $200,000 to have. LOL.)

There are a multitude of reasons why a rug’s dyes may run during cleaning. In fact, I wrote a post on several of those reasons behind how a rug’s dyes can bleed on you.

Blue dye migration on Wilton wool rug.

The careless cleaner approaches a rug as if they are all the same. “Wool is wool, what’s the big deal?”

Most don’t bother to do a dye test. Why? Honestly, I’m not sure why. It should be done on every rug, and it only takes a few minutes. This can be done with a high pH solution, or my personal preference of testing with hot water in a small area on the front AND the back.

Other careless cleaners do in fact do the dye test, but then they think if they use a dye stabilizing or dye locking solution that the rug becomes bulletproof to bleeding on them. That’s just not true, especially if the rug has colors that crock on a towel during a dry or damp towel.

The red dye crocks on to a damp towel.

When color crocks on to a cotton towel when it’s dry, or when it’s just damp, this is a serious problem. Especially if the color is a dark one.

In the case above, this is a tribal woven rug from Afghanistan. In some tribal areas, especially war-torn ones like in this weaving region, water is not always readily accessible to provide the thorough washing and scouring of the wool to remove the excess dyes and other impurities from the wool. So you have a rug that has some excess dye in the wool, that is going to move when it gets wet with a wash, so you better be seriously skilled to be able to handle that when it happens.

But sometimes the crocking is not from excess dye, but from color that has been added AFTER the rug was woven.

We call these rugs over-dyed rugs, and you will see these types of rugs come in two types:

1) TEA WASHED RUGS

A large number of rugs today, especially coming out of India, Pakistan, and China, are being given a tea wash treatment. This is a brown dye that is sometimes called henna wash, or also called having your rug “antiqued,” because it gives the rug a more muted look which makes it look older.

India tea washed rug

The tones vary from browns to golds to yellows. They make the rug darker, and also make the white cotton fringes beige or brown.

The better quality rugs are properly soaked in the dye to allow for even application, or are given multiple layers of application to ensure a good saturation and bonding of the tea wash dye to the rug fibers.

The lesser quality applications are sprayed on, usually on just one side, and it is often these lesser quality treatments that will crock on a dye test. This means that no matter how gentle you are with your cleaning process that over-dye is coming off. It’s like a spray-on fake tan… good until it’s time to take a shower.

Grin open the fibers and you see the bad tea wash job.

When you grin open the fibers you can see if there has been an over-dye treatment with tea wash. You can also see it on the fringe tassels by untwisting them to see if there is white under the beige tone.

Cleaning the fringe removes the tea wash dye on some.

And while you are closely inspecting the rug, look also for other pre-existing damage, because often a tea wash application is given to rugs to try to cover up damage such as pre-existing rug dye bleed or other stains.

It’s important to share with your client that the rug has been over-dyed with this tea wash treatment BEFORE you clean it, because likely some of it will come out no matter how gentle you are with your process. Especially if it crocks on you, that over-dye is coming off even if you choose a dry compound cleaning method.

But, at least it CAN be cleaned. You just need to share that this if it tests as a poorer quality application, that the rug has essentially been given a “spray-on tan” that needs to come off if they want it to be properly washed.

A much more perilous over-dye treatment isn’t dye at all… it’s ink.

2) INKED RUGS

Rug dealers for years have tried to hide small areas of damage on antique rugs with using India ink, or painting of worn areas to make them less noticeable.

Today this practice has unfortunately expanded to create some truly dangerous rugs.

New Hamadan rug bought on-line, and covered in INK.

The rug above is an example of one of the dangers of buying a rug on-line on one of these mass market retailers. When you buy rugs locally, at least you get the opportunity to “try it before you buy it” and take it out on approval. But more importantly you can do things like take a handkerchief and do a little dye test in the store just to make sure you are not buying inferior goods.

For a rug cleaner, this rug would be a nightmare. Every single color of this rug has been colored over with ink, which is why it has that blotchy, dark look to it. And when you grin the fibers open you can see that there is dark ink on the tips of the fibers.

Tips of the fibers are purple ink, base of the fibers are blue.

Taking a completely DRY towel to the face of this rug picked up every single color.

Dry towel picks up red from the rug easily.

Getting this rug even damp would make the inks pool together and make a mess not only of the rug, but of your wash floor.

So when you do your dye test on a rug, and it crocks, you want to investigate closely to see if it’s possibly ink applied to the fibers, because a dye stabilizing or locking solution is not going to do a thing for ink.

This rug, and others like it, is flawed product… and is not cleanable. And in the case of the rug being shown, the ink from the rug moved on to the underneath wall-to-wall carpeting which led to a much more expensive problem for the owner to handle.

Today more than ever, with the push to cut corners on production costs and get rugs to market faster and cheaper, there are more traps for rug cleaners today than ever before.

But if you are careful, and very thorough with your fiber and dye tests, and your pre-inspection checklists, then you can avoid the biggest rug disasters out there.

Happy Rug Cleaning!

- Lisa

I receive a lot of “help me” calls from rug cleaners and rug owners on rugs that are buckling. They want to know what to do.

And my answer is usually… it depends.

That’s because there are a number of reasons why a rug is buckling on someone. Some of these reasons are correctable. Others are not.

Here is the list of different causes of buckling:

Weaving Characteristics

No hand woven rug is perfectly symmetrical. There will always be a little bit of variance in the width and length, and some fluctuation in the weaving tension throughout the rug itself.

A city rug (woven in rug factories in weaving cities) will of course have more quality control than rugs woven by tribal weavers. I personally prefer the tribal rugs because they have more character and personality.

Weaver using a horizontal loom.

That said, in some tribal weaving centers, especially in areas that are war-torn like Afghanistan, the consistency can vary beyond being an interesting weaving characteristic to being seen as a weaving flaw in some extreme cases:

Tension along end of this Afghan rug causes buckling.

Buckling from weaving tension changes, or width or length variations, are not unique to Afghanistan. You see examples of this in all weaving countries. And in most cases they are seen as unique characteristics of a rug’s personality. Like a few great laugh lines on a smiling face, or dimples, they are what make the rug have character.

And as with those lines or dimples, you can’t just take a steam iron and make those go away. There is no “Rug Botox” to use.

Sometimes a weaver – especially if the loom is a nomadic one – will not know the rug has a “buckling” problem until after it is completed and cut off the loom. In some cases a rug manufacturer will apply a sizing to the rug (similar to starch) to try to make the rug stiffer than it would naturally be.

The problem with sizing is that it will wash out, and it may be difficult to have it re-applied. So if you are buying a rug, or you are getting ready to clean a rug, you want to look closely at the shape of the rug and if you see any evidence of problems on the BACK side.

Creases can be clearly seen on the back of this Afghan rug. These are causing buckling on the front.

Sometimes a rug can be stretched to help it lay flatter, but this is a strenuous process that may damage the rug.

Stretching an Afghan rug to help it lay flatter.

In these cases you need to think about weaving variations as no different than one of your feet being a bit larger than the other. Think of what you would need to do to try to make them perfectly equal, and then apply that though to a rug, on the work that would be needed to make a side that may be an inch longer than the opposite one even.

It is often impossible to do. So your expectations need to be realistic, and if the variations are too much, then pass on purchasing the rug.

Material Backings

With embroidery, needlepoint, and hooked rugs, the buckling is often due to the construction especially if that construction includes a heavy material backing.

Embroidery needlepoint rug with a heavy cotton backing.

This type of weaving, though often very elegant, can also often not be perfectly symmetrical. And when you have two independent pieces – the hand crafted needlework and the material backing – that are loosely stitch to one another, this can create some buckling and waves.

Crewel stitch (aka chainstitch) needlepoint with material backing.

Hand crafted custom rugs using different fabrics and fibers can also lead to buckling, especially along the seams of there the pieces are put together.

Seam tape can split and buckle.

Seam tape can split under foot traffic, or with age, or from cleaning (especially if the individual piece are made of different fibers and may react differently during the cleaning process. Some fibers swell when wet, others condense. Some are stronger when wet, others are weaker. Some absorb more moisture and dry slowly, others dry quick. And these variances can split a seam if you are not careful.

Tufted Rugs (Latexed Material Backing)

Tufted rugs are the rugs you see with latex holding it together. Latex over time deteriorates and crumbles away, so often it is covered up with material to hide this kind of ugliness:

Old latex delaminating on a tufted rug.

Rugs are meant to be on a HARD floor, and not over soft wall-to-wall carpet. But, sometimes a soft floor is your only option.

While woven rugs (rugs you can see the design on the back of the rug same as the front) have some “give” to flex when over a soft floor, a tufted rug is not so forgiving.

Heavy furniture on top of a rug that is over a carpeted floor can stretch the fibers of a woven rug, and in worst cases create tears and holes. And with tufted rugs, which have a latex backing holding them together, they can create waves in the rug you won’t be able to get out.

Buckling in a tufted rug from furniture.

With these rugs, once they have been stretched from heavy furniture, and the latex backing cracks and bends, it’s damaged and will be very difficult to make flat again. It’s like when an elastic band gets over stretched, you can’t get it back to its original shape.

With woven rugs, you have a better chance of washing and reshaping a rug that has gotten buckles from furniture. And to protect BOTH types of rugs, short of putting them on top of a hard floor instead, you can seek out a stiff pad to place between the rug and the carpeted floor.

If your rug is tending to want to move and buckle even when it’s on a hard floor, then often a good rug pad will keep you from having any safety risks of people tripping on it. (Plus pads are “shock absorbers” for rugs and keep them from wearing from foot traffic as fast, and they also tend to deter bugs from wanting to find a home under your wool rugs. I personally love Durahold pad for rugs on hard floors.)

Edge Finishes (By Machine or By Hand)

Sometimes the ends or sides of a rug are finished a bit too tightly, or overdone, and this can create curling of a rug.

Heavy side cord wrap by hand on this dhurrie rug makes the corners curl up.

Machine serging of edges created curling of this rug.

The curling may be immediate, or only evident when the rug gets wet or damp. The level of buckling depends on how the fibers react to water. Some fibers get tighter when wet, and loosen when dry. This is especially evident on oriental rugs that are tightly woven, and the cotton foundation fibers tighten up when wet. (Think about your clothes when you take them out of the washer. Your cotton items are smaller and tighter, and your wool items are looser and stretchy. Most woven rugs are wool face fibers twisted around cotton foundation warps and wefts, so “wet” they can create some buckling that will go away when dry.)

Side curls on this damp Sarouk rug that is drying face down.

Leather or vinyl strips are sometimes sewn along the sides to help keep them flat on the floor.

If a hand woven wool rug is perfectly flat when dry, but curls when it is wet, then it will regain it’s proper shape when dry. Don’t panic.

An exception is Navajo and other American Indian weavings. Often the outside wrapping threads are not pre-washed before being used in the final weaving, and these strands may shrink a bit during cleaning, which can give the illusion that the overall rug has shrunk, when it is in reality just the outside cords.

Navajo rug from a flood, the outside cords have shrunk creating a buckling of the rug.

On the very first cleaning of a Navajo rug, the outside cord will need to be adjusted to make up for the shrinking of the cords, and future washes will not be a problem as far as buckling. (There are other concerns when handling American Indian textiles, from potential dye migration to wool fuzzing, that require an expert’s touch when cleaning. These rugs can be quite valuable, so always seek out someone with expertise in handling these pieces, as well as any investment textile or rug.)

Floods and Extraction Equipment

When rugs are exposed to flood water for extended periods of time, buckling can result from the absorption of the water in the cotton foundation fibers. In most cases, this buckling will be correctable. Though you need to follow the right steps to make sure you thoroughly clean and decontaminate any rugs exposed to flood waters.  Click here => for tips on handling rugs from floods.

Heavy extraction equipment (Rover and Xtreme Extractor) though excellent at pulling out the water, can sometimes create some buckling on looser woven rugs that may or may not be correctable. Whether it’s this type of equipment, or other extracting wands, it is better on the rug to extract from the BACK of the rug to try to avoid any marks or buckles from equipment. When using a wand it can help to have someone stand on the edge you are extracting to help hold the rug flat while doing the work.

Most rug cleaning facilities have roller or spinner wringers to remove water, which removes the buckling risk. Especially with the rollers, which tend to flatten out the rug smoothly for the drying process. But if extraction is your water removal method, you just want to make sure you are not too aggressive in this step.

Buckling in field of a rug from extracting.

Hanging Rugs To Dry

There are a couple negatives to hanging rugs up to dry if you do not have a professional climate controlled drying tower like the large rug washing plants have.

Hanging up a rather wet rug can bleed the dyes into the fringe. It can also create browning and discoloring of the fringe.

It can also, from the weight of the water, create a creasing of the rug that is difficult to remove, especially if the rug is tufted.

Some ways to lessen the risks are to try to get as much water out of the rug before hanging. If you do not have large water removal equipment, you can use a Water Claw in addition to your portable or truck mount wand to boost your extracting. The Rover, with its teflon head is excellent at removing water from heftier rugs without leaving any marks (even if you have to extract from the front side). Just make sure the rug is not too fragile.

Instead of hanging rugs on narrow planks, you can place a PVC pipe around the planks so that you can have it curved enough to help prevent creasing. You can also hang the rugs at at angle so there will not be a clean line of where the rug was bent to hang, like this:

Hang rugs at an angel to lessen potential creasing.

We dry our rugs out flat to avoid these risks, but most rug cleaning companies do not have the space to do this. So this helps if you have a mini-rack system that you are using.

* * *

These are the most common reasons behind rug buckling, and the situations where something can be done about it… or can’t.

Happy rug cleaning!

Lisa

P.S. I’m super excited because I’m finally ready to announce my return to the “rug training circuit” with a program that will be the best educational experience in our industry for crafting experts in the field of rug care. If you love rugs, and want to learn directly from me, then make sure I have your name on my Rug Chick list by entering your name and email in the “Rug Disasters Report Request” box up in the top right corner of this website. I’ll be picking a small number of companies in the coming weeks from my list to work with this year, so if you are interested in getting serious about rug cleaning, plug your name in up top! =)

The recommended cleaning method for wool oriental and specialty rugs, is washing them.

For as long as rugs have been woven, they have also been washed. Though in the past with a bit more “low tech” methods than are available today.

Rugs being washed near a river.

But before the washing even begins – the beating does!

Let the beating begin!

Rugs – ESPECIALLY wool rugs – have a capacity to hold a large amount of soil in them. This is because wool under the microscope looks kind of like fish scales, so lots of layers, with MANY places to hide dirt and grit. See, take a look:

Wool strand under a microscope.

It’s these many “little pockets” that hold soil, and why a wool rug can have POUNDS of soil in it and still not look especially dirty. The dirt is hiding. And not just dirt and soil, but a whole host of other contaminants. Look at what came out of this rug by vacuuming the back side of the rug with an upright beater bar vacuum:

Pounds of soil out after dusting the rug on the back side.

This rug below also, shows the soil from using a heavier dusting machine (a Rug Badger):

Pounds of soil "beaten" out of a rug before washing.

There are several reasons why cleaning rugs requires them to be removed from the home. The big one is of course the removal of this soil before cleaning, and then the actual washing of the rug itself, which simply cannot be done with standard carpet cleaning machines (a portable or truckmount). Those are considered surface cleaning and not washing.

In fact, here is the latest cover story of Cleanfax Magazine, where the specific reasons why choosing to clean a rug in the home can cause more harm than good. This is information every professional cleaner should know, and certainly what their clients need to know regarding any rugs they value:

CLICK HERE => The Dirty Truth About Rugs

Dirty Truth About Rugs

I am not saying that rugs can just be tossed in water with no worries. You do need to understand what you are doing. We get calls regularly from homeowners who thought they could hose down their rug, and then discover that this can lead to dye bleeding, buckling or shrinking, and incredibly long drying times.

That because those “tiny pockets” that hold soil, also can hold a lot of water molecules too. Wool rugs get HEAVY when wet, and the inside fibers are absorbent cotton warps and wefts that swell with water, so you need to have the equipment capable of removing that level of moisture so that the rug can be properly and thoroughly dried quickly.

Some rug cleaning operations are more “workshop” operations instead of high-volume rug cleaning facilities. I guess you would call them “boutique” rug operations. They wash the rugs one at a time, and have some equipment to help them be more thorough in the dusting, washing, rinsing, and drying processes.

They may use a large wash floor to wash the rugs, like this:

Persian runner being washed thoroughly.

Rug being rinsed thoroughly. Can't do this "in" the home.

Some rug cleaners have not poured a wash floor yet, or don’t have the space to, and so they use wash “pits” to give rugs a bath in, like this:

Small rug wash pit.

I have one skilled rug cleaner friend who owns a “pit” for a handful of his clients who will now allow their highly valued rugs to leave the premises, so he sets up a cleaning system on their property and washes them on premises in their back patios.

This still takes him several days of follow-up visits for dusting, washing, drying, and finishing time, and requires additional equipment brought in for extracting the water and airmovers to dry.

(FYI –  the Rover is excellent for removing water from a washed rug without any marks and the Studebaker Airpaths are fantastic to help speed up drying times).

These particular clients he charges multiple times his in-plant washing price  versus if they allowed him to clean them properly (and more conveniently) in his rug plant… but sometimes you have to build the “wash system” to make sure investment rugs are properly cleaned. What he does not comprise on is “surface cleaning” when he knows they need to be cleaned right. So a wash pit in the backyard!

In the mobile auto wash industry, they sell inflatable wash containment “pits” that can be easily used for this type of on-location more thorough washing or in your facility if you do not have an inclined wash floor for cleaning.

Here’s one I found on Amazon for less than $600 => Inflatable Car Wash Containment

Ideally though you have a proper wash floor, and bring in larger equipment to help boost your performance and production as you grow. Some of this equipment is a sizable investment, so do the best with what you have and grow when you are truly ready to, and can afford to. I’ve had several friends sink several hundred thousand dollars into opening large rug cleaning facilities, and then go under before they had time to enjoy their new business.

But before you run out and buy any cool new tools for yourself, invest first in the proper rug education and training, because as I’ve highlighted in several recent blogs I receive rug cleaning disasters weekly from both cleaners and homeowners on rug cleaning that has gone bad. The wrong methods, cleaning solutions, temperature, drying conditions, as well as poor rug construction, can lead to rug disasters.

In an upcoming post I’ll share some of the options for different tools and equipment you can use, based on different budgets, to get your rug shop set-up properly. There are LOTS of options for you.

I’ll also be giving you some direction on getting more experience and education in this craft.

My goal is to make sure professional cleaners (and rug owners!) know how to best care for woven rugs, and give them the best information and resources to make that happen.

All my best,

Lisa

True or false - A colorfast wool rug can bleed?

=> TRUE.

The rug may be colorfast in CERTAIN situations. For example, with a regular cleaning or wash, with a neutral or acid side cleaning solution, the rug could be perfectly fine. No dye migration (aka “bleeding”).

But, under different circumstances, it could absolutely have dyes migrate and bleed out.  Some possible culprits – using high heat, using high pH solutions, keeping the rug wet too long (or in a flood), or exposure to pet urine stains.

True or false – A dye fix/lock/stabilizing solution used by cleaners “sets” a wool rug’s dyes?

=> FALSE.

The solutions available in our industry for professionally cleaning rugs do not “set” the dyes. They STABILIZE them. This means with wool or silk rugs that are NOT colorfast, but test “stable” with the intended stabilizing solution, that you have a WINDOW OF TIME to clean them. (FYI – with silk rugs that window is MUCH shorter than with wool rugs. You better know what you are doing if you are handling silk, or subcontract the work to a rug plant with silk rug expertise.)

I hear many “salespeople” sharing that you “set” the dyes with this or that.

That is not only inaccurate…

…it is downright DANGEROUS.

A cleaner sent me photos from a job where he applied dye fix on two identical rugs for cleaning. He no problem with the first rug cleaning, using his truck mount. (Which, by the way, you should not use truck mounts to clean oriental rugs period… but I’m not going to get into that right now.)

The heat began kicking in after the first rug was done, and so the matching rug with the same dye fix and the same rug cleaning solution EXCEPT now with added much warmer water – you got this…

Heat is bad for natural fiber rugs.

…red dye bleed.

The danger with well-trained professional carpet cleaners deciding to add “rugs” to their services is that their experience with installed carpeting does not transfer to natural fiber oriental and specialty area rug cleaning.

And the solutions, tools, and techniques they own don’t transfer well either.

In the home, heat, alkaline solutions, and the best tools for getting the installed synthetic carpet the cleanest possible, can absolutely ruin natural fiber rugs.

The most common rug problems I’m asked for help with from professional carpet cleaners are 90% due to applying the wrong cleaning techniques to rugs that they do not have the right knowledge about.

And one of the most common results are, dye migration or dye loss or discoloration.

A rug’s value can vary from a cheap $100 Pottery Barn rug to a rug worth millions of dollars.

If you are not sure what you are working on, you might take a little time to find out the basics. And certainly determine the fiber type, and especially the dye stability.

Here are some helpful posts to educate you on dyes:

Click here for video => How To Do A Dye Test

Click here for post => Why Some Rugs Bleed

Click here for post => Watch Out For Bleeding Wefts

Click here for post => Watch Out For Tea-Washed Rugs

Click here for post => Pet Puddles. What To Do To Avoid Damage

I hope you found these reference items helpful. When you know what to look for, and really get the basics of rug cleaning down pat, you can avoid most of the pitfalls that result from the lack of good information (or misinformation) about properly cleaning rugs.

- Lisa

P.S. If you want to learn some of the most common mistakes made by carpet cleaners when cleaning rugs, in the right column of this blog you can opt in for my Rug Disasters Report. I lay out the top 10 most common mistakes I see when handling all of the “help me!” emails that come my way week after week. This is also the way to be on my list for announcements of my upcoming training programs and workshops. (Don’t worry, I HATE SPAM… so you will not hear from me very often, your email will never be rented or shared with anyone else, and it’s super easy to opt-out.)

With the number of home floods escalating due to severe weather, a number of rugs will be exposed to flood water.

The longer a rug remains wet the more likely it is to have dye migration that is not correctible.

Rug dyes have bleed.

Rugs that are not washed properly, and not dried thoroughly, can end up with mildew and dry rot problems.

Mildew eating away the cotton foundation.

Rugs left wet too long can lead to dry rot - it just crumbles apart. This was wet too long in a storage unit.

Here are tips to minimize the damage to oriental rugs involved in floods:

-       Extract the water as soon as possible using a wet vacuum or having your water damage restoration company extract with their professional water removal equipment.

Water claw

DriEaz Rover

(Professional equipment like the Water Claw and the Rover are the quickest way to remove water in the home from wet rugs. The Water Claw should be used on the BACK side of the rug. The Rover can be ridden and pulls much more moisture out quicker, and with the smooth lip on the extraction points, it can be used on the front or back of the rug.)

-       Make sure you wand extract WITH the direction of the rug’s fiber nap, instead of against it (this minimizes fiber damage). If you “pet” the rug, it’s like petting your animals, you can feel which direction is *with* the grain, and which is against it.

Extract quickly. Best if done with professional equipment.

-       If you are unable to have the rugs thoroughly washed right away, then it’s important to get the rugs as dry as possible as quickly as possible to lessen the risks of permanent damage. Dry them fast and wash/sanitize them later.

-       When transporting to a rug cleaning facility to be washed, wrap in towels or sheets to prevent dry from migration from one rug to another. It is very difficult to remove dye migration.

-       Do NOT hang up wet rugs. Extract and dry out flat. Hanging wet puts too much weight on the foundation of the rugs, and will pull the migrating dye throughout the face of the rug and into it’s fringe tassels.

Dry rugs flat after extraction.

Use axial fans like Airpath to speed up drying. Dehumidifiers also as needed in contained areas.

-       Do NOT dry in direct sunlight. Most contemporary rugs are sensitive to sunlight fading. If you must dry in sunlight, lay the rugs face down so fading occurs on the back side only until the rugs are taken to a rug washing facility.

Powder blue color is faded to tan when this rug was placed face up in direct sunlight to dry.

Wool and silk oriental rugs can take months, sometimes years, to weave by hand. If you have investment textiles you want to protect from a flood that has affected your home, simply follow these guidelines and you can lessen the risk of permanent damage to your rugs due to extended exposure to water.

Once you have done your best to minimize the damage, the rugs then need to be thoroughly washed and sanitized before being returned to the home. This is done in professional rug washing facilities.

Rugs in floods need to be fully washed to remove contaminants from the innermost foundation fibers.

Rugs from floods need to be soaked in a sanitizing solution and then washed and rinsed thoroughly.

Even the filthiest rugs can come out looking fantastic with a good bath.

Silk rug (before). © RugChick.com

Silk rug (after) © RugChick.com

When it comes to something as messy and dangerous as floods, it’s best to leave it to the professionals.

Print and keep these tips handy in case you have the unfortunate experience of having your home flooded. And you will know what to do in order to help protect your favorite rugs, and to make sure they are clean and safe when they are returned to your “fixed up” home.

- Lisa

P.S. If you like this post, then please *share* it so that others who might have floods will know what to do too. Thank you!

I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately on bugs eating rugs – so I thought I’d share some tips for both rug owners and rug cleaners.

Moths ate the wool, left behind the cotton foundation.

The two biggest wool rug culprits are moths and carpet beetles.

Moths: rug enemy #1.

Carpet beetle: rug enemy #2.

For some more extensive ways to get rid of theses critters from your home, visit this site for moths, and this site for carpet beetles.

For rugs, there are several steps you can take to keep the bugs from digesting your oriental rugs.

VACUUM REGULARLY

These bugs like nice, quiet, undisturbed places. You will generally find them doing their dirty work under the corner of your sofa, behind a drape, along the cracks in the planks of your wood floor, or on the back side of a rug hanging up still on your wall.

You do not need to “beat” the rug with your vacuum, just give it a good once over on the front every few weeks, and flip over the corners to see if there is anything to be wary of. Moth larvae looks like sticky lint and they do their damage when they emerge from those cocoons HUNGRY.

I like to run my vacuum upholstery tool over the back of the corners of my rugs, just to be safe, and once a quarter I completely vacuum the back side of my rugs to make enough chaos to have bugs look for another place to feast.

For rugs hanging on the walls, at least once a quarter take them down to vacuum. If they are delicate you can use the upholstery attachment instead of a beater bar or super-sucker type vacuum. Because of this needed maintenance for hanging textiles, this is why we like to suggest using velcro to hang rugs – it makes it easy to take down and put back up.

WASH REGULARLY

Rugs under normal to heavy use should be washed annually.

This means sending them out to be washed in a rug cleaning plant, and NOT having them just surface cleaned in your home. (BIG difference, especially if you are trying to avoid bugs.)

If you have moderate traffic on your rugs, and you vacuum at least every other week, that wash time can be extended to every 18-24 months. But longer than 2 years, you are asking for trouble. Not only from the abrasive grit that gets lodged into the base of the rug fibers (which is what causes areas to wear down faster), but also in regards to insect activity.

Washing helps dislodge bug activity and remove it. And for rugs with a big problem you are looking to solve, and you do not want to soak the rug in pesticide poisons, washing and giving the rug a vinegar rinse will help physically remove the bugs and their problem-causing ways.

FOR STORAGE – ALWAYS WASH BEFORE WRAPPING UP

Rug cleaners rarely offer “mothproofing” these days because those solutions are pesticides that kill things, and for something you may have your kids or pets rolling around on, that’s just not safe.

Even the odorless insect repellent solutions that professional cleaners have available and are not poisons still have some irritation risks. (Always read the MSDS to evaluate whether you want to use a particular product that requires leaving residue behind.)

But if a textile is going into storage for years, it is best to make sure you are not going to open up the package and find a rug disaster, so using a repellent is wise unless you are putting the piece in a cedar chest, or using other items that tend to discourage moths.

When I put something into storage, I don’t want to worry about it, so I use a repellent.

The most important step though is the wash and making sure you are not wrapping the rug up with any unwanted pest guests.

If your rug does have a visible insect problem right now, while it is out to be professionally washed you will need to bring in a professional cleaner to tackle your wall-to-wall carpet or your hard floors, wherever the problem rugs were, so that you can remove the rest of the problem.

Hot water extraction (“steam cleaning”) can take care of the problem in your carpeting – something the EPA lays out guidelines on for how often you should have this done as posted on the IICRC website.

To sum up, rug-eating bugs are kind of like unruly teens. They like to go hide in their space, and they don’t want you to bother them.

So you need to pull open the curtains to let fresh air and sunlight in, clean up their surroundings so they escape the fright of it all, and make a routine of that so you don’t end up with bigger problems down the road.

Your teens will come back (hey, they need to eat…), but the bugs will move on to another place with a less attentive rug owner in charge.

- Lisa

How many drinks do you need to decide to create this out of an old Tabriz rug?

Tabriz bear rug

Tabriz bear rug full image

How many drinks do you need to pay $1,800 for it?

Actually…if a rug is damaged, has little resale value, and cannot be safely used in its current condition, it is nice to be able to give it a “new life” in a different format. Pillows, wall hangings,…I’ve just never seen Bear Rug before as a way to recycle a rug.

But what about this weird one…a rug in Puerto Rico, made from…

Can you get the smoke odor out of this?

…discarded cigarette butts!!!

Close up shot - KOOL!!! (bad pun...I know...)

It is unbelievable what some people will create and call art.

If you ever come across rugs like these, I call them simply “Weird Rugs” – then here’s some how-to suggestions on how to clean them (but, truly, you won’t be able to get the smoke odor out of that rug…):

Cleanfax – Weird Funky Rugs You never know what you are going to come across…that’s what I love about this business – always something NEW to surprise you.

- Lisa

P.S. Those of you who are professional rug cleaners, two topics of interest to you, some current industry politics that is affecting the rug cleaning industry…and shows that even in our little world of rug cleaning, we have political pollution. Surprise, surprise…

A couple times a month I get a photo of a rug that comes in that breaks my heart… because you see a really nice rug damaged by something that was entirely avoidable.

My last post showed a rug that was damaged by not being attentive with a piece of dusting equipment on a Turkish rug.

The technician had not been careful with a heavy piece of equipment, and paid the price.

He was not trained by his instructors on how to keep from letting that happen when you are not paying attention to what you are doing. (See in the comments of that thread how to use Tyvek to protect from that damage.)

In the same week I was sent a photo of this nice wool rug that a professional cleaner bled.

Front side - red dyes have bled.

Back side - red dyes have bled.

Now…if there is ONE thing I’d like you to take away from this post, it is this:

HIGH HEAT IS BAD FOR WOOL RUGS!

(It’s also bad for silk, FYI.)

Think about your clothing for a minute…how many items do you wash in HOT water, and put in a HOT dryer?

Some, I know… but most, no.

Why?

Because many of the fibers – especially NATURAL fibers – have a problem with that. Loss of color, shrinking, loss of finishing and texture.

When was the last time you took your nice wool sweater and washed it in HOT water, and dried it on HIGH heat?

Now, wool rugs are different from wool fabrics in construction – but many of the characteristics, and risks, are the same.

And with this rug, the cleaner had two runners to clean. He used an approved WoolSafe shampoo, dye stabilizing solution, wash pit set-up, and truck mount with a water claw as well.

First rug – no problem.

Second rug, as the heat kicked in on his truck mount (he had set it low to begin with, and it increased over time)… suddenly a problem. The dyes bled. Despite the dye stabilizing solution.

He was working under two false assumptions here:

1) That dye stabilizing solutions “set” dyes indefinitely. They don’t. They give you a window of opportunity to clean, and if you have a rug with dyes that are not colorfast, that window is VERY small. You gotta wash it quick.

2) That HEAT is okay for wool. For oriental rugs, it is not. One of the reasons I test a rug’s dye strength with a HOT water test is because I want to know IMMEDIATELY if there is any chance at all a rug will bleed on me. I wash with cold, but I test with hot – to be safe. Sometimes rugs can bleed right away…sometimes it takes some time, so you need to know what you are working with, and use the right solutions to strengthen the dye-fiber bond during your thorough wash process.

Now…this professional cleaner was told by one of his instructors that wool is okay at up to 140 degrees of heat, so he was not worried…until it bled that is.

This was an IICRC-instructor who told him this. An instructor who is not a rug cleaner, but apparently gives some advice on rugs. I’m not sure why.

But, you see, with wool wall-to-wall installed carpeting, using heat to clean is commonplace. But generally you will not find in a home, installed wool carpeting with bright reds, blues, and other vivid acid dyes as you will with oriental rugs, or specialty fine fabrics.

In the latest cover story of Cleanfax Magazine, I mention several things that this post is focusing on: 1) the shortcomings in today’s training in the fields of rug cleaning and upholstery cleaning, and 2) that I believe someone well-trained in upholstery and fine fabric care would be a BETTER oriental rug cleaner than someone well-trained in residential carpet cleaning.

Here’s the article, which I co-authored with Jim Pemberton (an expert in upholstery and fine fabric care):

Cleanfax – Sept 2010 Cover

Homes with nice investment-grade textiles on their floors, almost always also have investment-grade fabric on their furnishings. They go hand in hand.

And with fine furnishings, or oriental rugs, there needs to be an EXCELLENT eye and hand for testing and inspection. Fiber tests, dye tests, construction identification, and inspecting for any pre-existing conditions that might hamper your cleaning results…or lead to a cleaning disaster. You need to be able to spot these BEFORE they become problems.

Something shared with a client before cleaning is EDUCATION, and after cleaning is an EXCUSE.

The more time you put into the front end with your attention to detail, the less you will spend on the back end trying to clean up a mess, or pay for one.

There is a serious shortcoming in our training today, at least in these specialty niches of oriental rugs and fine fabrics.

My hope is that making a post like my previous one (showing how a Rug Badger could damage a rug if you are NOT careful), and this one (showing how a mistaken belief about heat not being bad, and dye stabilizer being a “fix”), will help keep anyone in the rug cleaning world to be just a little bit more attentive to what they are doing.

This might be a 1 in 100 chance of happening to a rug cleaner…but I can tell you…being that one that it does happen to, really sucks.

Just ask the guys who handled these recent rug disasters.

Hope you enjoy the article!

- Lisa

In this month’s issue of Cleanfax Magazine, I have an article on the interesting (aka WEIRD) rugs that we come across, and what to do when you you have something you don’t know what it is.

Enjoy the article!

- Lisa

Cleanfax – Weird Funky Rugs