You had told me one year ago that at 26 years old, I would have fallen in love with handknotted rugs of all things; I wouldn’t have believed you. Nor would I believe that I would have become so invested; I’d have spent thousands of dollars on close to a dozen pieces, rare books, and special tools. Before the end of summer last year, I regarded rugs as many people do: little more than floor coverings with interesting designs. That all changed when I started on a
journey to discover what made a rug worth buying. I’d like to walk you through my evolution from being oblivious to rugs to falling in love with them.
The Beginning
My girlfriend is actually responsible for my initial interest. She had told me to keep an eye out for rugs, as she was looking for one for her home, and I was frequently visiting estate sales at the time for antique furniture. The prices that were being asked for some rugs seemed extravagant to me, and after a particular sale where I debated about buying a vintage kilim for 30-40 minutes, I decided I needed to find out more about them and why they commanded such high prices. This led me to the first rug book I ever bought, and one that I have seen in almost every dealer’s shop since: Oriental Carpet Design by P. R. J. Ford.
Ford’s book is essentially a textbook detailing rug designs and where they originate from. His writing is surprisingly easy to read, and I read the book cover to cover. What Ford’s book doesn’t do is provide extensive details about rug construction, preferring to focus on the design of the rug as the primary method for distinguishing where the rug was made. Any rug expert will tell you, however, that the back of the rug is where its true story is told. At this point in my rug learning, I was able to distinguish between a few common origins.
For instance,
I could tell a Heriz apart from a Kashan (Heriz are very geometric, while Kashan are finer and more floral), but I still lacked the knowledge of rug construction to tell a Heriz apart from a Karaja or Gorevan (nearby villages that make rugs similar in design to Heriz but use different weaving techniques).
The more I read, the more I realised I still had to learn. Even those I’ve spoken with who have been in the business for decades, as dealers or appraisers, do not consider themselves experts. You might think that this ocean of unknown knowledge might put me off of learning more, but it had just the opposite effect.
Each new book I bought or bit of information I learnt about how to tell one rug from another made me feel accomplished and a little more like I knew what I was doing. I felt like I was unearthing secret knowledge that was only available to the select few. But an appraisal of a rug’s age and origin is only one piece of the puzzle. As I learnt more about them, I started to appreciate the true artistic value that a rug holds.
Keep exploring—read more here: Flokati Rugs: From Ancient Greece to Modern Living Rooms
What is a handknotted Rug?
A hand-knotted rug is a piece of art that has taken months or years to create, depending on the size and density of the knots. Yarns are strung from top to bottom on a loom, and these create the warp of the rug. If you look at a handknotted rugs, the fringes at the top and bottom are what remain of these warps. Once the warps are strung, then the weaver proceeds to weave yarn from side to side. This is known as the weft.
If you think of a rug as a grid, the warps are the vertical lines, and the wefts are the horizontal lines. What makes a rug different from a kilim or flatweave is that it also has a third element: knots. Now imagine that every two neighbouring warps are tied together with loops of yarn. These knots have trailing ends that become the pile, the cushiony, fluffy part of the rug, which gives it extra durability to last generations.
Above is the simplest explanation of how a rug is made, but depending on where the rug is made, certain features can change, which changes the whole character of the rug. Some areas weave with only one weft ( also called a shoot ) in between every row of knots. Others use 2, 3, all the way up to 8 in some places. Rugs can be as coarse as 64 knots per square inch or all the way up to 800 or even higher. The differences are endless, and the more subtle ones can take a long time to be able to tell apart.
However, one thing unifies all handknotted rugs: whether they were woven by tribal nomads or in villages or workshops, they are all pieces of art that were woven with a great deal of manual labour. In contrast, a machine-made rug has no weaver, and in the eyes of many rug lovers (myself included), it doesn’t have the soul of a handknotted rugs, not to mention most offer severely reduced durability compared to their handknotted counterparts.
The Soul of a Rug
My search for soul led me to pursue antique rugs. Much has changed in the weaving industry in Iran and other areas where rugs are woven in the past century, and not usually for the better. With some exceptions, antique rugs me offer a more authentic artistic expression with less commercialization and standardized designs. The weavers had more freedom to express themselves and weave unique designs.
This is also the reason why some collectors focus on tribal rugs, which are woven more for personal use, and using traditional patterns and knowledge, as opposed to rugs woven in workshops, which often were designed and then transferred to graph paper, which the weavers look at while weaving. This is all personal taste; some collectors love the exquisite artistry and exactness that exemplify workshop rugs, and neither category is any less an art form.
Also Read: Oriental Rugs, the Works of Art
However, as a side effect of collecting antique rugs, I’ve also had to learn how to deal with damage. A lot can happen to a rug in 100 years, and most of them do not make it that long without needing some repairs. Rug repair can be quite expensive if paying a professional, so to try and save on costs, I started to learn how to do repairs myself. I started by speaking with several experts whom I’d met either in person or online rug forums, and then I started consulting books such as Peter Stone’s Oriental Rug Repair. Even though I wasn’t skilled to start, I was eager to learn, and all the professionals I reached out to were very generous with their time and advice, even sending me some supplies to get started.
Learning more about how to fix rugs has also helped me better understand their construction and given me an even deeper respect for the effort that goes into creating them in the first place. When you sit down to repair a rug, you’re able to feel some trace of the original weavers. You feel connected to its history, and careful repair feels like bringing life back into older pieces.
Conclusion
So now, less than a year later after discovering handknotted rugs & other rugs, I have more knowledge about them than I ever thought possible. My friends jokingly refer to me as “the rug guy.” I’ve spent hours and hours repairing antique pieces, and my house is filled with pieces of incredible textile art from over 100 years ago.
If you’re new to the world of rugs, you don’t have to follow in my footsteps, but I hope that you will see that a rug is so much more than just something to decorate your floor with. It is a piece of art, of love, and of culture that deserves to be appreciated and cared for. I hope that no matter how much you know about handknotted Rugs, you will continue to learn and enjoy the wonderful worlds that are contained inside these woven masterpieces.
A collection of books that helped me along my journey:
Oriental Carpet Design – P.R.J. Ford
Oriental Carpets: A Complete Guide – The Classic Reference—Murray Eiland Jr and III
The Persian Carpet – A. Cecil Edwards
Oriental Rug Repair – Peter Stone
And a special thanks to Essy of Essy’s Rugs in Montgomery, Alabama, a resource that I could not do without.
Written by Hans Koehler
