Selvedge and border repair

Selvedge and border: two words, two things

The two terms get confused in everyday speech. The border is ornamental: it is the drawn frame that surrounds the central field. The selvedge is structural: it is the band of tight wefts, taken over the last warp threads, that stops the rug fraying along its long sides.

The border can be damaged without touching the selvedge — a stain, a fading, wear to the motif. The reverse is more serious: an open selvedge lets the wefts withdraw one by one, and the rug loses width, permanently.

A simple check: run a finger along the edge. If you feel the overcasting thread, full and even, all is well. If you feel bare weft, hard and ridged, the selvedge has already gone at that point — even when the rug looks intact from above.

Overcasting, stitch by stitch

Repairing a selvedge means redoing an overcast: a tight stitch that folds the thread around the edge and grips the end warp threads. It is worked with a tapestry needle, with a thread chosen for the colour of the edge and for its strength — wool on a wool rug, cotton on a cotton foundation.

Evenness is everything. An overcast that is too tight pulls the edge and makes the rug ripple; too loose, it lets the weft through and works free at the first wash. A correct overcast feels under the finger like a full cord, the same thickness along its whole length.

At the corners, the line of overcasting must meet the line of the securing stitches of the fringes. It is the weak point of every rug: four corners where two finishing systems cross, and where both generally give way at the same time.

When the edge weft has gone

If the wear has eaten beyond the selvedge, overcasting alone is no longer enough: there is nothing left to grip. The edge wefts then have to be reconstituted, over a few millimetres or a few centimetres, by passing thread back between the end warps, before overcasting again on top.

On rugs in traffic — corridors, entrance halls, large sitting rooms — the reinforcement is doubled: two thicknesses of thread, or a heavier thread doubled with a row of securing stitches. The edge regains a stiffness close to the original, and the rug stops folding back on itself at every passage.

Binding tape and tapijtboord

The binding tape is an added band, sewn along the edge to reinforce or decorate it. It is legitimate on rugs that already carried one, and on working pieces that one wants to protect. It is not legitimate as a cover-up: laid over an eaten selvedge, it masks a problem that carries on underneath.

Before sewing anything at all, we look at the back. If the edge wefts are still moving, they are fixed. The binding tape comes after the structural work, never in its place.

The opposite move exists too. On an antique rug that never carried a binding tape, we remove the one a previous workshop sewed on and we remake a selvedge in thread: that is what the rug had originally, and that is what sells.