Hand knotted silk rug repair - in progress


 After professionally cleaning the silk rug, we attached it to a temporary wooden frame to begin the repair process.  We removed all the compromised fibers, including the pile, warp, and weft and began reconstruction of the warp and weft, which in this rug were made of cotton.


 Our next step was to reknot the rug's silk pile along the first of the two damaged edges of the rug.  The picture below shows the repaired pile before we cut back the yarns to match the height of the rest of the pile.



We then rotated the rug to begin the repair process on the other damaged rug edge.  As with the other edge, we rebuilt the warp first as seen below.


Working in silk is generally more labor and time intensive as silk is a very fine material.  Furthermore, the stark geometric motifs of this silk rug do not provide a restorer many opportunities to hide any "mistakes" therefore requiring a high level of precision in all the knotting and weaving.  Both of these facts make rug repair projects such as this one an interesting and enjoyable challenge.  --

www.traditionalrugrepair.com