This week has been very busy. We have been hunting down more beautiful antique and vintage carpets for our shop and we also added a new section to our store. Now, we carry modern, hand-tufted and machine made carpets.
For the middle of October in the Northeast today was exceptionally warm and it looks like we have a few more warm days before fall makes an appearance. Warm, sunny days are perfect for drying a freshly cleaned rug. They are also fantastic for bringing my work outside. Today I got to work on a couple repairs that Mike has been saving up for me at the shop. One of them was a moth nick in a nice vintage Afshar rug about the size of a dime. Most of the time rugs with moth nicks have several areas of damage, this one was interesting because it was a perfect circle and there was no other damage to the carpet.
Once that was re-knotted I repaired a couple of tears in a nice Nichols Chinese rug. It was almost like someone cut right through it. Nichols rugs are typically very thick and durable.
The last few rugs needed to be evened out. The most common damage I see is wear at the fringe ends of an Oriental rug. With foot traffic, the knots at the fringe ends eventually wear down and no longer protect the actual knots of the rug from falling out. Simple overcasting prevents this wear and secures the knots from falling out. Overcasting is an affordable repair to proactively protect a valuable Persian rug.