Rug repair and restoration in Singapore

It is easy to think a fringe is just decoration at each end of the rug. It isn’t. The fringe holds the rug together, and once it goes, the rug starts to come apart.

A handmade rug is woven on a grid of base threads. The threads that run along the length are called the warp, and the ones that run across are the weft. The soft surface you walk on is knotted onto the warp, row by row. The fringe is simply the ends of the warp threads, tied off to hold everything in place. The side edges do the same job along the sides.

So when a fringe frays, you are not losing trim. You are losing what holds every warp thread in place. Left alone, the knots near the end start to slip, and the rug loses length for good. This is why we treat fringe work as urgent, and why a new fringe now costs far less than re-weaving later.

A good rug is strong, but it can still wear through. Walking on the same path, a dragged chair leg, a pet or moths will all open up the surface in time. Once the base threads show, the hole grows every time the rug is walked on or rolled.

We can close small gaps by hand with stitching. Larger ones need re-weaving: we rebuild the base threads across the missing area first, then knot in wool that matches the original in colour and thickness. We follow the pattern through the gap so the design lines up again.

It is slow work, and the most skilled thing we do. It is also why we always ask for a photo before we quote: the size of the hole matters less than the state of its edges. The earlier we repair a hole, the smaller and cheaper the repair.

It isn’t the moths that eat your rug. It’s their larvae (young moths). One moth can lay hundreds of eggs, and the larvae eat the wool down to the base threads. In Singapore’s humidity they work quickly.

Look under furniture and along the edges of the rug: anywhere dark and undisturbed. Larvae avoid light and people walking past, which is why damage is often found late, under a sofa. Fine sandy grit and silky webbing in the rug are the signs to look for.

Before we repair anything, we get rid of the eggs, larvae and moths. Then we re-knot the eaten areas and strengthen any weak base threads. If you have other rugs in the same room, have them checked too, because larvae move from one rug to another.

After treatment and repair, we can wrap your rug in breathable material and store it with us until you need it.

Colour run (colours bleeding into each other) is the damage we are asked to fix most often. It is often caused by a well-meant clean. The wrong water, a household carpet shampoo or a cleaner who doesn’t know handmade rugs can make a strong colour, usually a red or a dark blue, bleed into the pale wool next to it.

A flood, a knocked-over vase or a pet accident can do the same. The longer the colour sits, the harder it is to remove.

Often we can draw much of the bled colour back out. First we find out what the rug and its dyes are made of, because wool, cotton and silk each react differently, and natural dyes behave differently from man-made ones. Then we choose one treatment that suits the rug, rather than trying one thing after another.