Colour restoration and reviving

The sun never strikes twice in the same place

Sun fading is asymmetric by nature. A window lights one band, a piece of furniture shields another, and the rug ends up with two halves that no longer have the same value. Madder red turns towards salmon pink, indigo towards grey-blue, and the yellows go first.

The diagnosis is made by parting the pile with the fingertips. If the colour at the foot of the knot is strong while the tip has faded, only the exposed part has suffered: retouching is possible and the result will be stable. If the fibre is discoloured over its whole height, the pigment has been destroyed — often by a household product rather than by the sun — and there is nothing left to restore, only to recolour.

Vegetable or aniline: what the colour tells you

Until the last third of the nineteenth century, everything was dyed with plants and insects: madder for the reds, indigo for the blues, cochineal for the crimsons, saffron for the yellows, gall nut and iron oxide for the blacks, walnut husk and vine leaves in support. These dyes age by softening, without going muddy.

Aniline colourants, imported from Europe, appear in Turkey around 1882: their presence dates a rug to after 1870-1880. They hold less well to water and account for most cases of dye bleed. Knowing which of the two is in front of you changes the method — a rug in vegetable dyes is not retouched with a colourant that will move at the first wash.

The abrash — those horizontal bands of slightly different tone — is not a fault to be corrected. It is the signature of a change of dye bath, and therefore an argument for authenticity. Removing it costs the rug value, and it is irreversible.

Retouching, point by point

The work is not applied with a brush over a surface. It is done fibre by fibre, laying the dye on the faded tips alone, in several light passes rather than in a single coat. Each pass is dried and then checked in daylight before the next, because a colour judged under a bulb is a colour badly judged.

We work in vegetable dyes, for the same reason that we re-knot in wool and not in synthetic: the material added must age at the same rate as the material around it. A well-conducted retouch remains reversible and blends in over one or two seasons of shared patina.

Reviving, for its part, dyes nothing. It is the hand wash that gives the pile back its lustre, by removing the greasy film that dulls the fibre, and then the brushing with the lie of the pile that lays all the fibres in the same direction. Many rugs said to be faded need nothing more than that.

Dye bleed is a different problem

When a red has run into an ivory, the colour has not faded: it has migrated. It is a washing accident, almost always tied to a poorly fixed colourant and to water that was too hot — in cold water the migration of the dyes is very slow, whereas above 40 °C it becomes markedly active.

The treatment is therefore a matter of washing, not of retouching: the migrated pigment is removed before judging what is left to put right. Retouching over an untreated watermark amounts to repainting around a leak.