How to make rugs

by Candace Wheeler

The next and most important thing is colour, and it is a great advantage if the dyeing can be done at home. There is a strong and well-founded preference among art producers in favor of vegetable dyes, and yet it is possible to use certain of the aniline colours, especially in combination, in safe and satisfactory ways.

Every one who undertakes domestic weaving must know how to dye one or two good colours—black, of course, and the half-black or gray which a good colourist of my acquaintance calls light black; indigo blue equally, of course, in three shades of very dark, medium and light; and red in two shades of dark and light. Here are seven shades from the three dyes, and when we add white we see that the weaver is already very well equipped with a variety of colour. The eight shades can be still further enlarged by clouding and mixing. The mixing can be done in two ways, either by carding two tints together before spinning, or by twisting them together when spun.

Carding together gives a very much better effect in wool, while twisting together is preferable in cotton.

Dark blue and white or medium blue and white wool carded together will give two blue-grays, which cannot be obtained by dyeing, and are most valuable. White and red carded together give a lovely pink, and any shade of gray can be made by carding different proportions of black and white or half-black and white. A valuable gray is made by carding black and white wool together (and by black wool I mean the natural black or brownish wool of black sheep). Mixing of deeply dyed and white wool together in carding is, artistically considered, a very valuable process, as it gives a softness of colour which it is impossible to get in any other way. Clouding—which is almost an indispensable process for rug centres—can be done by winding certain portions of the skeins or hanks of yarn very tightly and closely with twine before they are thrown into the dye-pot. The winding must be close enough to prevent the dye penetrating to the yarn. This means, of course, when the clouding is to be of white and another colour. If it is to be of two shades of one colour, as a light and medium blue, the skein is first dyed a light blue, and after drying is wound as I have described, and thrown again into the dye-pot, until the unwound portions become the darker blue which we call medium.

In a neighbourhood where weaving is a general industry, it is an advantage if some one person who has a general aptitude for dyeing and experiments in colours undertakes it as a business. This is on the principle that a person who does only one thing does it with more facility and better than one who works in various lines. Yet even when there is a neighbourhood dyer, it is, as I have said, almost indispensable that the weaver should know how to dye one or two colours and to do it well.

Supposing that the material, in the shape of coarse cotton warp, black, red or white, has been secured, or that a wool filling in the colours and shades I have described has been prepared for weaving; the loom is then to be warped, at the rate of fifteen or less threads to the inch, according to the coarseness or fineness of the filling.

It is well to weave a half-inch of the cotton warp for filling, as this binds the ends more firmly than wool. Next to this, a border of black and gray in alternate half-inch stripes can be woven, and following that, the body of the rug in dark red, clouded with white. After five feet of the red is woven, a border end of the black and gray is added, and the rug may be cut from the loom, leaving about four inches of the warp at either end as a fringe. If the filling yarn is of good colour, and has been well packed in the weaving, so as to entirely cover the warp, the result will be a good, attractive and durable woolen rug, woven after the Navajo method.

In this one example I have given the bare and simple outline by following which a weaver whose previous work has been only rag carpet weaving can manufacture a good and valuable wool rug. The difference will be simply that of close warping and a substitution of wool for rags. Its value will be considerably increased or lessened by the choice of material both in quality and colour and the closeness and perfection of weaving.

The example given calls for a rug six feet long by three feet in width. To make this very rug a much more important one, it needs only to vary the size of the border. For a larger rug the length must be increased two feet, and the border, which in this case must be of plain or mixed black—that is, it must not be alternated with stripes of gray—must measure one foot at either end. When this is complete, two narrow strips one foot in width, woven with mixed black filling, must be sewed on either side, making a rug eight feet long and five in width. It is not a disadvantage to have this border strip sewn, instead of being woven as a part of the centre. Many of the cheaper Oriental weavings are put together in this way, and as many of the older house-looms will only weave a three-foot width, it is well to know that that need not prevent the production of rugs of considerable size.

Endless variations of this very simple yarn rug can be made with variation in size as well as in colour. Two breadths and two borders, the breadths three feet in width and the borders one foot and six inches, will give a breadth of nine feet, which with a corresponding length will give a rug which will sufficiently cover the floor of an ordinary room. If the centre is skilfully mottled and shaded, it will make a floor spread of beautiful colour, and one which could hardly be found in shops.