Fine Rug Cleaning
Rug before and after cleaning
Fibre-Clean of Croydon offer a high quality rug cleaning service that ensures your rug is kept just the way you want it. Every rug is unique so we have developed non-abrasive cleaning methods that suit both age and type of dye. All work is carried out by hand to ensure your prized possession is left as good as new.
Cleaning your rug will help retain its natural feel and enhance its colors, we do everything we can to ensure your favorite rug is cleaned with non-hazardous material or bleach ensuring a quality finish every time.
What is an oriental rug?
Continuing confusion results from the common use of "Oriental Rug" as a generic label for any variety of patterned carpeting. Furniture stores, carpeting dealers, some large home improvement stores (and even some rug dealers) sell a constantly changing mix of machine-made and hand-made rugs which they often lump together and advertise as "Oriental Rugs". Often the salesperson in such a store has little or no knowledge about hand-knotted rugs, and does not clearly distinguish among the machine-made copies and genuine Oriental rugs in his stock.
For most all dealers in genuine Oriental rugs, an "Oriental rug" is a piled or flat woven fabric hand-knotted in one of the traditional weaving areas of the Middle or Far East. Genuine "Oriental rugs" come from Afghanistan, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Tibet, Turkey, some of the southern territories of the old Soviet Union (like Azerbaijan or Armenia), Balkan countries like Romania and Albania, and some North African countries like Morocco and Egypt. Genuine Oriental rugs are not made in Belgium or anywhere else in Western Europe or in the United States (there are hand-woven rugs made by native Americans in the American Southwest, but these are called "Navajo rugs" or "American Indian rugs"). "Wilton"®, "Karistan"® and "Couristan"® rugs are made by machine in Oriental rug designs; they are not "Oriental rugs". No genuine Oriental rugs are made of nylon or polypropylene.
Adding to the confusion is the appearance of several varieties of hand-made rugs that are not hand-knotted rugs. Easiest to mistake for hand-knotted rugs are the hand-tufted rugs from China and India. Hand-tufted rugs are made using a "gun": a hand-operated tool that punches strands of wool into a canvas stretched on to a frame. The design of the rug is drawn on the canvas, and the worker fills in the pattern with the appropriate colour wool. When the rug design is fully piled (and this can take as little as three or four days for 2.75m x 3.6m (9' x 12') carpet), the rug is removed from the frame and a scrim fabric is glued to the back of the rug. It is only the glue on the back of the rug that holds the wool pile in place - yarn is not knotted over warps as with a real Oriental rug. Because the tufting process does not produce the fringe that is normal to a hand-woven rug (where the fringe is the end of the warp strings that run from one end of the rug to the other), separate fringe (usually woven as a tape) is often glued or sewn to the ends of a tufted rug.
The tufted rug is handmade, but it is not an "Oriental rug" because it is not knotted. In deciding to make a tufted rug instead of a real Oriental rug, the maker has chosen the cheapest way of making a piled rug. The tufted rug will rarely wear as well as the hand-knotted rug because the wool is almost certainly of a cheaper grade, and because the inexpensive latex glue used becomes brittle and deteriorates over time. A hand-tufted rug has resale value only equivalent to a machine made rug of the same size.
Tufted Chinese rugs appear in colours and patterns almost identical to hand-knotted, pastel Chinese rugs. Hand-tufted Chinese have fringe like hand-knotted Chinese, and from the front look nearly identical to hand-knotted Chinese. Whereas a 2.75m x 3.6m (9' x 12') hand-knotted Oriental rug in "90 line" quality (a commonly available weave) might cost about £1,000, a 2.75m 3.6m (9' x 12') hand-tufted Chinese rug would cost no more that about £300. Tufted rugs from India come in wide variety of qualities, colours and patterns, including both floral and geometric Persian designs. From the face they can closely resemble low to medium quality hand-knotted rugs.
Materials
There are approximately one thousand breeds of sheep in existence, but only a few types provide the wool used for carpet weaving. The shoulder wool is the longest and most expensive. It provides superior strength, resilience, softness and durability. Often the wool from different breeds of sheep is blended together. This is done to reduce the cost of the carpet, or to combine the best properties of each wool type.
In terms of durability, the type of wool used in the rug is very important. The drier the wool (market wool) tends to wear out faster and absorb stains more readily. These come from a variety of sources, often local to the area of weaving. On the other hand, a wool rich with lanolin, which is an oil found naturally in the wool, will last longer, is more resilient, and takes the dye better to produce a wider variety in colour.
This superior quality wool can come from many sources, but among the best are New Zealand and Australia. Other factors include the climate in which the sheep are living and the type of food they eat. Although the wool is not graded as such, it can be described in terms of quality, and should be an instrumental part of the decision making process in choosing the right rug for your needs.
There are many steps involved in preparing the wool. First the sheep are sheared. This is similar to a shave and does not harm the sheep. Then the wool is washed, sorted and carded to remove debris and align the fibres.
Nest they comb the wool to remove the shorter fibres, which are less durable. Then the longer fibres are twisted and spun together. This determines the strength of the yarn. The more twist, the stronger and harder it becomes.
The last step in creating the yarn is called plying. This is a process of twisting the strands together. Three ply is three strands, and so on.
Fibre-clean's inspection and assessment of rugs on site involves:
The first step in the procedure of cleaning any rug or textile is to perform a thorough inspection and evaluation of the piece to be cleaned. The rug is spread out flat under good lighting, so that the style, design, origin, age and approximate value of the rug can be identified as completely as possible.
Below is a breakdown of the things we take into account when assessing your rug:
| Construction Woven - Machine made or hand knotted Braided - Filler Hooked Needle punched Other |
Style or Design Pattern Density Texture Colours |
| Tensile Strength Dry rot Tears Snags |
Colours and Dyes Bleeding Crocking Fading |
| Fringes and Edges Binding Serging Overcasting Fringe type |
Soiling (real and apparent) Amount Type Spots/stains |
When the inspection and evaluation is complete, it is important that we advise you, the customer, to be sure that your expectations are consistent with ours.
We explain what will happen to your rug, how long it will take and how much it will cost and as much as possible what kind of results you can expect.
Any deficiencies or concerns will be noted in writing and acknowledged by the customer.