From minor fringe touch-ups to full re-weaving.

It is easy to mistake a fringe for decoration — a tidy finishing touch at either end of the rug. It isn't. The fringe is structural, and once it goes, the rug starts to come apart.

A handmade rug is built on a grid of threads. Those running the length of the rug are the warp; those running across its width are the weft. The pile you walk on is knotted onto alternate warp threads, row by row. What you see as a fringe is simply the warp threads emerging at the ends, knotted off to hold everything in place. The side cords are the same idea along the edges, binding the weft.

So when a fringe frays, you are not losing trim — you are losing the anchor at the end of every single warp thread. Left alone, the knots nearest the end begin to slip and the rug loses length, permanently. This is why we treat fringe work as urgent rather than cosmetic, and why re-fringing early is far cheaper than re-weaving later.

A good rug is durable, but nothing is immune. Footfall along a walking line, a dragged chair leg, a pet, or a moth infestation will all eventually open the pile — and once the foundation is exposed, the hole grows every time the rug is walked on or rolled.

Small gaps can be embroidered closed by hand. Larger ones need genuine re-weaving: we rebuild the warp and weft foundation across the missing area first, then knot in wool matched to the original for colour, fibre and knot density, following the pattern through the gap so the design resolves correctly on the other side.

It is slow work, and it is the most skilled thing we do. It is also the reason we always ask for a photo before quoting — the size of the hole matters far less than what is happening at its edges. The earlier a hole is treated, the smaller and cheaper the repair.

It is not the moths that eat your rug — it is their larvae. A female can lay hundreds of eggs at once, and the grubs that hatch feed on wool protein, grazing the pile down to the foundation. In Singapore's humidity they work quickly.

Look under furniture and along the edges of the rug — anywhere dark, still and undisturbed. Larvae avoid light and traffic, which is why damage is usually discovered late, under a sofa, long after it started. Fine sandy grit and silky webbing in the pile are the giveaways.

We eradicate every stage — eggs, larvae and adults — before any repair begins, then re-knot the grazed areas and reinforce any part of the foundation that has been weakened. Treating one rug and not its neighbours is usually a false economy, as larvae migrate between pieces.

Colour run is the damage we are most often asked to reverse, and it is very often caused by a well-meaning clean. Water that is too alkaline, a domestic carpet shampoo, or a general cleaner unfamiliar with handmade rugs will release dye from a saturated colour — usually a red or a deep indigo — into the pale wool beside it.

Flooding, a knocked-over vase or a pet accident will do the same. The longer the dye sits, the deeper it sets.

In most cases we can draw the migrated dye back out and return the rug's natural balance so it does not happen again. We identify the fibre and the dye type first — wool, cotton and silk each behave differently, and a natural dye behaves nothing like a synthetic one — and choose the treatment from there, rather than applying one remedy after another and hoping.