Rug Repairs for Fringes & Edges

Helpful Tips on carpet care from Deluxe Dry carpet cleaning

Fringe Damage

The fringes of a rug are very vulnerable  and one of the most easily and commonly damaged place on any carpet or area rug. The fringes can be quite long and are usually constructed of  light coloured cotton or wool , they are easily tangled or soiled and discoloured or broken off.
If the fringe of your rugs is very dirty you may want to try washing it without soaking the rest of the rug, it can be a bit tricky to accomplish this and requires putting a towel or plastic sheet below the fringe area and then spraying with cleaner or washing the fringe and then rinsing it and drying with a hairdryer.  The fringes should be thoroughly and carefully  rinsed and  dried after washing, otherwise the water in the fringe will travel into the body of the rug and may cause colour transfer on to underlying carpet or colour bleed within the rug itself.

We strongly recommend that bleach and any bleach containing cleaning product not be used on a rug fringe. Even in solution a bleach can wick from the fringe into the body of the carpet and cause problems. Bleach can cause disintegration of older cotton fringe fibres and will discolour wool fibres. It is very expensive to repair  bleach damage to rugs

Curled edges and corners

Curling corners and edges in a rug are a very common problem. This is not due to wear but to problems in the knotting of the rug during its manufacture. It occurs often in those rugs that are  tightly knotted and that have a  thick pile. This happens because the rug  is much wider at the surface  of the rug than at thebase of  knot. The fibres spread as they reach the surface of the rug away from the knot.

Even very expensive and high quality rugs can eventually  start to  curl at the  edges. The curl is partly caused by the difference in the surface and base width of the  rugs, but another common reason is  that too much tension has been allowed in the weft fibres when the rug was being constructed. The weft fibres are the foundational fibres that run the  the width of the rug. If these weft fibres are not   continuously adjusted during the weaving of the rug it will produce a curl in the rug later.   A well woven rug has to be adjusted for tension throughout the weaving process.

To repair curled corners and edges in a rug is not easy. Whether it can be restored depends partly on the source of the problem– It has to be determined whether the curl is from excessive tension in the weft fibres or whether it has been knotted too tightly.

These problems are not apparent when the rug is new but they become worse over time. In most situations the edges of the rug have to be cut and the weft fibres loosened and then the edges resewn. It is not possible to force the edges of a curling rug to lie flat just by force or by using heavy books etc. It is a problem in the structure of the rug and has to be addressed by experienced carpet repair techincians