Holes, tears and worn areas

Hole, wear, tear: three distinct kinds of damage

A hole is a loss of material right through: pile, weft and warp have gone, and the floor shows through. Wear is a loss of pile alone, the foundation staying in place — that is what you find under a table or in a hallway. A tear follows a line: the warp or the weft has broken, and the rug opens like a zip.

Treatment differs in all three cases, and the diagnosis is made from the reverse. It is from the back that you see what foundation is left, and therefore what will have to be rebuilt before anything is reknotted.

Wear that does not go right through deserves a mention of its own. As long as the foundation is in place, the repair consists in filling the pile back in, not in reweaving: it is the lightest intervention on this page, and the one people put off longest, wrongly.

Small hole: darning and invisible mending

Under a few centimetres, and as long as the warp is present on either side, the work is done with a needle. Darning interlaces threads across the gap to recreate a local weft. Invisible mending goes further: it puts real warp and weft threads back in, in exact continuation of those of the rug, then anchors them in sound material.

Successful invisible mending shows neither from the front nor from the back. That is where the mark of quality lies: on the reverse, the repair must have the same grain as the neighbouring cloth, with no extra thickness and no stiffness under the finger.

Hole right through: reweave first, reknot after

As soon as the warp is cut, it has to be put back up. New warp threads are stretched across the area, the wefts are passed between them, and the result is a new foundation at the density of the old. Nothing shows yet: at this stage the repair looks like a piece of unbleached canvas in the middle of the rug.

Then comes the reknotting. Knot by knot, the pile is rebuilt on that foundation, with the original knot — asymmetric senneh on a Persian, symmetric ghiordes on a Turkish or Caucasian piece — following the design read off the intact areas. Finally the new pile is sheared to exactly the height of the pile beside it.

It is the longest work in the workshop, and the most worthwhile: a properly reknotted rug can be handled, washed and resold like a whole rug.

A tear: make it safe straight away

A fresh tear is far easier to repair than one six months old, because the edges have not yet frayed. If you cannot bring it to us straight away, roll the rug — do not fold it — so that the line of the break stops working every time someone walks over it.

Do not glue anything. Textile tapes and hot-melt adhesives leave a residue that stiffens the foundation, shows after washing and has to be removed fibre by fibre before any real repair. A glued tear costs more than a tear left as it is.

And measure it. Photograph the damage with a coin laid beside it: size changes everything. Under a few centimetres, the work is done with a needle, the rug flat. Beyond that, the area has to be mounted on a frame, and it is no longer the same job.