How to be able to recognize if a carpet has excellent quality?

Posted by markwahlbargg on June 27th, 2019

Choosing the right handmade Persian rugs that fit in harmoniously or in the desired contrast with the style of the furniture or with the personal tastes of the buyer is not easy.

The choice is then very wide and being able to orientate oneself in this wonderful world without an expert guide can be complex. Without being experts in weaving art, you can start learning to distinguish authentic handmade Persian rugs that can be found on the market today.

High-quality handmade rugs are generally recognized by the quality of the materials used. Some of these materials include luminous and prestigious wools, the use of vegetable dyes, and the characteristic softness and strength of the rug. A carpet knotted with mastery, for example, does not capture dust.

Hand Knotted Carpet Production Techniques and Designations:

Before continuing, we need to distinguish between hand-knotted and machine-made rugs:

Not all carpets are hand knotted. Some are defined as “handmade” because in their realization there is no knotting phase, which is the phase that requires the greatest expenditure of time and care. So these are simple fabrics composed of warp and weft, maybe even very beautiful, but they cannot have the value of a hand-knotted carpet.

Rug can also be made mechanically with the help of a machine. Machine-made rugs are imitations of the handmade ones. The machine-made ones capture the same visual quality as a hand-knotted one, but not the same touch as a hand-knotted rug.

The intrinsic quality of the original hand-knotted rug, its durability, and nobility of its history cannot be compared with a machine-made rug.

How To Easily Recognize a Hand Knotted Carpet:

A useful trick to recognize authentic handmade Persian rugs is to fold a corner of the carpet. The authentic hand-knotted rug will be softer and easier to bend than a machine-made one, stiffer, and more resistant to bending. This big difference is given by the use of synthetic fibers instead of natural ones: the original hand-knotted rugs, in fact, are made only of natural materials such as wool, cotton, and silk.

The fleece, the hair of the carpet, is created in the tens of thousands of knots made with woolen threads. The knots, in addition to forming the fleece, create the characteristic design of the carpets.

In handmade rugs, the filaments that make up the warp, once the work is completed and disconnected from the frame, become the fringes that are seen in the shorter side of each authentic rug.

If you are looking to buy an authentic Persian rug, it is advisable to buy it from a reliable Iranian rug store.