Restoration Specialists Can Save Your Valuable, Old Rug

Even the finest Oriental, Persian, and antique rugs get damaged and worn. When that happens, a professional rug repair and restoration service can put new life back in your wool, silk, hand-knotted, hand-tufted, or machine-made rug. Most rug restoration companies offer a variety of repair and specialty services.

Holes and Rips

A rug repair artisan, who trains for years to become skilled at his or her craft, can repair a hole or tear in your rug by reweaving or re-knotting the torn or worn area. Rug shops also replace worn or damaged pile. In some cases, rug restoration involves hand painting worn areas to match the original pile. Textile dyes are painted onto the rug with the use of a small paint brush. Although painting can improve the appearance of an old rug for years to come, painting a collectible rug may diminish its value.

Worn Edges

If your rug doesn't have a hole, but the edges are worn, the rug shop can rebind the sides and ends by hand. New edges should be the same color and of the same material as the wrapping around the other edges of the rug. A rug repair shop can also straighten and over sew worn edges. Keeping the ends and edges of a rug in good repair helps prevent the necessity for more expensive repairs to the rest of the rug.

Re-Fringing

The fringes of Persian and Oriental rugs eventually wear out. When that happens, the rug ends can fray and unravel. Fringes protect the edges of your rug, but they are easily prone to wear and are usually the first part of a rug in need of repair.

Taking your rug to a professional, like Tashjian's Oriental Rug Service, for re-fringing protects the rest of the rug from unraveling. The sooner you take your rug into a shop for repair, the more damage you can prevent. A skilled professional will match the original fringes as closely as possible and then add new fringes by hand. Since not everyone likes the way new fringes look on an old rug, if the fringes on your rug are seriously damaged, you may choose to have them removed and the edges of the rug over sewn to keep it from fraying. Or, you may choose to have the fringes folded under and covered with binding material so that you can have the rug re-fringed at another time.

If your hand-woven rug is starting to unravel, artisans at a repair shop can do what they refer to as overcasting -- a process that requires stitching over an unfinished edge to stop the rug from unraveling. The person doing the repair weaves a durable thread or yarn in between the weft threads along the edges of the rug. Weft threads are the threads that run from side to side in a woven rug.

Special Services Rug Shops Perform

Rug repair shops often offer additional services, which may include:

• Resizing a rug to make it smaller
• Applying an antique tea wash to hide flaws in the rug or make it look older
• Hand sewing a rod sleeve pocket on the back of the rug so that you can hang it on a wall