Modern carpets | How find and buy modern quality carpets

Differences in modern carpets

How pick out and buy excellent modern carpets

In the sea called the web one can find anything, especially of poor quality, and those who want to buy a carpet hardly understand how it is really done: it is based almost exclusively on colours and trust, which we believe insufficient to take any firm decisions. Now we want to explain how the modern carpets on the market are made, compared to the ones that we chose to deal with: they might look alike, but they are not of the same quality level. This way you could understand that if there is a small difference in price, this is amply justified.

Modern carpets and indian shaggys

Hand tufted carpet (pictured above) is a technique widely used in China and India, whereby the operator, manually or with a mechanical tool, inserts without making the knot, every woollen or polyester hair on a made to measure cotton structure to form the design of the carpet; to make the hair remain in their place, a glue is applied on the back, at times silicone, sometimes latex. To finish, a more or less solid canvas is glued on the back. They are therefore easier and quicker to make and, placing themselves in the economy range, very often the wools used are of low quality. Indeed, very often instead of wool a polyester yarn is used, very easily dirtied and of poor durability.

Difference between knotted modern carpets and the glued “tufted”

In addition to sales we have always had our carpet washing laboratory: here we have seen that, over time, the glue crumbles and you find it under the carpet as if you had spilled a bag of cornmeal; also they form a down. Often, when washing the fabric comes off, the carpet loses consistency and becomes wavy.

Retro Shaggy tufted

Shaggy hand knotted modern carpets

Carpet mechanical Nylon

Lory hand knotted modern carpets

The modern rugs you see on our site are rigorously hand knotted with spun and dyed by hand wool, as you can see in the photo above on the right, just like the traditional classics and will never give any problem of hair or washing: you just have to rely on a really qualified dealer. See our just knotted Tuli carpets, also known as Shaggys.

Let’s talk about machine-made modern carpets

The differences between a machine-made carpet (pictured left) and a hand-made one are significant. Unfortunately, almost no one knows how to distinguish one from the other. While in hand-made modern carpets synthetic fibers are never used instead of wool, silk and cotton, in the machine-made ones this happens very often, both for the fleece and the structure; in hand-knotted modern carpets fringes are formed by extensions to the warp, in machine-made ones the fringes are added when the carpet is finished; in some machine-made modern carpets the fringes are part of the warp.

A carpet’s specifications

Have you noticed that on many sites much prominence is given to the price (perhaps with more percentage of discounts calculated having decided in advance the final price) so that it looks like a “gift”, but no space is given to the carpet’s specifications; also if the picture is not very sharp even we fail to understand what the carpet is really like. And if we cannot do it, after a lifetime surrounded by modern carpets, how can the poor customer do it. In the picture on the right we show other differences: the added fringes and machine made edges compared with those of hand-knotted modern carpets ; the knots in the hand-made artifacts (pictured right) and the absence of knots in the machine-made ones (left). If you look carefully the knots in a hand-made carpet are very reminiscent of a tie knot.

Edge sewing machine

Edge hand made

Particulars on the materials generally for the fleece.

When one thinks about a carpet’s fleece, one is reminded of wool and silk, but there are different types of wool and silk is not always so real. Regarding modern, good-quality, oriental carpets, these are normally woven with excellent wool spun by hand, quite strong and doesn’t give off any down; when they are washed the results are great and they last a long time. There are oriental carpets, like some cheap Indian Gabbeh , made with very poor quality wool (sometimes also recycled) that give off a lot of down and do not last very long. When are washed they give off real fur balls. These rugs can be recognized because the fleece is opaque.

If you look at the Gabbeh carpets in our collectionyou will see a great difference.

For silk, instead, things more serious: if the carpet is cheap (but sometimes even when it costs a fair amount) it is not made of silk but viscose. It often happens that sometimes people come to us to have their carpet washed convinced that this is made with silk, but it is not. When asked “how much did you spend? ” they reply with a figure so low as to make it impossible to purchase a silk carpet of that size. This fake silk also has some big problems: it is very easily dirtied, the fleece fades and bristles after a few years: these carpets should not be bought.