Construction and materials
Your rug is available in 2 qualities - hand tufted and hand knotted. Whichever quality you choose, all of our rugs or carpets are made by highly skilled and experienced teams of craftsmen in modern well-run factories where we can guarantee no child labour is used at any stage.
Handtufted
The pattern of your selected design is scaled up and projected onto a cotton ground canvas that has been stretched onto a tufting frame and is then drawn on. The tufters then use manually or electrically operated devices to place and cut the pre-dyed wool or viscose in the correct position and colour, row by row, as indicated by the coloured pattern. When tufting is complete, another layer of cotton canvas is then applied to the back of the ground cloth with natural latex thus securing the wool or viscose firmly in place. As an alternative to natural cotton cloth, we can also finish the rug with 'action backing' using a strong and stable woven synthetic fabric. After being left to dry out naturally, the rug is then removed from the frame and the edges securely bound. It then undergoes a thorough finishing process of removing excess yarn, delineating the pattern even more accurately and cutting the pile to an even height before, in most cases (some are not in order to achieve a more fluid unstructured look), being expertly hand carved with special scissors to accentuate the pattern and colour separation. Hand tufted rugs are not normally washed but this extra process can be done at your request. After a thorough final check, the rug is then ready for packing and shipping.
Handknotted
Hand knotting is one of the oldest known methods of making rugs/carpets - every piece is entirely woven by hand, knot by knot. Also known as 'flatweave', it is a very labour-intensive method but the superior results speak for themselves. To start with, cotton threads (known as warp threads) are stretched vertically around the loom to form the basic shape and size of the piece. The yarn is then knotted horizontally around these threads in row upon row to form the rug/carpet itself. The pattern of the design is copied by the weaver from a full-scale graph which locates the position of every single knot with each knot resulting in a single point of colour. After the rugs/carpets have been removed from the loom upon completion, they go through an exhaustive finishing phase which includes cutting the pile to an even height and manually delineating the pattern with scissors to enhance the clarity of the design. After this the pieces are manually washed which gives the wool the extra lustre and depth of colour that are a distinguishing feature of this type of rug/carpet. They are then left to dry our naturally and given a final check before packing and shipping.
Your rug is available in a selection of materials as standard - it can either be made in the finest quality New Zealand wool (generally acknowledged to be the best in the world), or a finest quality imported wool specially blended for Rugsbespoke (RB wool), viscose ( a hand made fibre also known as rayon or art silk) or a combination of wool and viscose. If however you are looking for something different, we have the ability to offer many more types of materials and techniques. We are also open to developing completely new designs according to your own ideas or references. Please contact us and we can go through the extra options with you.
Shagpile
We offer our hand knotted shag pile rugs in any size or shape in 2 qualities - they can be made all in wool but also in a blend of wool and viscose and are available in any of our 600 colours. They can also be made in a combination of multiple colours - for technical reasons we cannot show these combinations on our website but we can certainly arrange for strike-off samples of your chosen colours to be sent to you for approval. The wool used in these long pile rugs is double dyed in 2 separate phases to provide extra depth and purity of colour. Furthermore, all these rugs have wool backing rather than the usual cotton, all adding to the superior quality of these opulent and luxurious rugs.
