Rug Cleaning Tips To Keep It Looking New
Did you know that hand-knotted rugs can last centuries if taken care of properly? Taking the time to carefully sort through colors, patterns, and various sizes of rugs at Holly Peters Oriental Rugs & Home is only the first step in your rug journey. Once your beautiful rug is home and you’ve found the perfect spot to place it, it’s time to implement a rug care routine. Preventing Normal Wear and Tear A lot happens to your rug throughout the course of a normal day. Shoes are walking over it, pets are playing on it, sunlight travels through windows and lands on your perfectly vegetable dyed fibers. Dirt, dust, and germs can all become trapped within the hand-knotted threads. Given everything that your rug goes through, it’s important to take care of it properly to keep it looking like the work of art that it is. One really important step is to vacuum your rug. I’m sure you’re thinking that’s a pretty obvious tip, but did you know you’re supposed to vacuum both sides of it? While this won’t remove all the dirt and debris from within the pile, it certainly helps get rid of some of it between professional cleanings. The next crucial step to maintain your rug is to rotate it. This is important because, similar to a mattress, you want your rug to wear down evenly. When you leave your rug in the same place for months on end, the same areas get walked on over and over again. Rotating your rug helps reduce this issue and extend it’s life. The pile isn’t the only thing that wears down though. The sunlight that comes through your windows will fade the color of the fibers over time. Depending on the surrounding furniture and the amount of light a room gets throughout the day, you run the risk of uneven fading if the rug isn’t rotated occasionally. Our last rug care tip is to invest in a good rug pad. Not only will this prevent your rug from slipping and sliding around, but it will add a bit of cushion and ultimately keep your rug looking nicer. It’s a necessary buffer between the textile and the floor that can extend the life of your rug by 30%. Add A Professional Cleaning To Your Spring Cleaning Checklist While vacuuming, rotating, and a rug pad are great ways to keep your rug looking top notch, nothing replaces the deep clean...
Oriental Rug Dyes – Natural & Synthetic
We have seen that one of the ‘revolutionary’ aspects of modern rug production has been the return of natural dyes. Not long ago, shoppers who were interested in new rugs (or who couldn’t or wouldn’t spend the money to buy antiques or semi-antiques) had no choice but to buy rugs with synthetic dyes. Today, though, natural dyes are an option in new rugs and, in fact, you will have to decide between natural and synthetic dyes if you buy one. The choice is important because, aside from everything else, natural-dyed rugs cost roughly 30 percent more than synthetic-dyed rugs. Let’s look closely at oriental rug dyes and how they compare. Natural Oriental Rug Dyes You will find that I use several words for natural dyes: ‘natural’, ‘vegetal’, and ‘vegetable’. I prefer ‘natural’, but use the others simply because I get tired of typing out ‘natural’ time after time. ‘Vegetal’ and ‘vegetable’ are slightly misleading because one natural dye, cochineal, is made from an insect and is not vegetal at all. Once a manufacturer of Turkish kilims told me proudly that she makes her rugs from ‘organic’ dyes. I seemed to remember from high-school chemistry that ‘organic’ refers to any material that is carbon-based, and I questioned her closely about organic dyes. She admitted that she bought the dyes from a Swiss dye maker. I’m still not clear what ‘organic’ dyes are, exactly, but something tells me that they are not mixed from roots. Rugmakers of the Middle East and Asia have used natural dyes for thousands of years. In the classic model, weaving is done most often by women and dyeing most often by men. In some important rug-weaving areas of the Middle East, dyers make reds from dried, ground madder root and (less often) from cochineal, blues from indigo, yellow from weld, green from sequential dyeing in indigo and weld, brown and camel from walnut husks, other colors from many other vegetal substances. Every area has its own indigenous materials from which dyes are made. Some dyeing takes place in two steps. First, in a process called ‘mordanting’, yarn is dipped into a hot solution of alum or iron, which prepares wool fibers to bond permanently with dye. Then the yarn is placed in vats of hot dye where it is cooked for shorter or longer periods of time and at higher or lower temperatures, depending on the dye and the shade desired. Natural...
Incorporating Oriental Rugs into your Interior Designs
Browse through fifty years of Architectural Digest, and you will find that Oriental rugs are featured in at least one home in every issue. In fact, Oriental rugs have been prized in Western interiors since the 16th century. Why? Because they make rooms look wonderful, and they do it instantly, without any trouble at all. Besides that, they’re practical. They’re easy to care for and they last for decades. Designing with Oriental rugs is surprisingly easy. Essentially it’s a matter of trying rugs at home until you find one that looks great. One needn’t be an expert to judge what looks good, and, in fact, the most important thing is to find a rug or carpet that you really love. 1. If possible, start with the Oriental rug. A hundred and fifty years ago, Edger Allen Poe wrote that “the soul of the apartment is the carpet.” He meant that the carpet is the foundation of the décor, and all else flows from it. The moment you choose carpets for a room, you establish how the room will be laid out—into one large space, for instance, or, using several smaller rugs, into discrete areas such as the space before the fireplace or the area behind the sofa. Secondly, when you choose the rug or rugs for a room, you establish the colors that will look good in it. It is far easier to buy furniture and fabric to complement the carpet than the other way around. Emmett Eiland’s Oriental Rug Company can help make it easy to choose furniture and fabric to match your carpet by providing you with a free 8 by 10 professional photograph of any carpet you buy from us. Take the photo with you for reference when you are shopping for furniture. 2. Using this website is a good way to get started. On it you can easily familiarize yourself with the styles of Oriental rugs that are available, their cost and so forth. You will be able to search by many parameters simultaneously. For instance, you may want to do a search for new rugs between 9 and 10 ft wide by 12 to 13 ft long, with natural dyes, formal designs and blue fields. Or nearly anything else. Keep in mind that not all of Emmett Eiland’s collection is online. To see everything in stock, visit the store in Berkeley. Eventually you will want to try rugs at home on an...