As I have said, they are woven almost invariably in horizontal stripes of two blues, or blue and white, with darker ends and a warp fringe. Simple as they are and indeed must be, as they are the result of unskilled labour, they are pleasant to look at, and have many virtues not dependent upon looks. They are warm and pleasant to unshod feet, and therefore suitable for bedroom use. They are soft to shoe tread, and give colour and comfort to a summer piazza. They can be hung as portieres in draughty places with a certainty of shelter, and can be lifted and thrown upon the grass to be washed by the downpour of a thunder shower, and left to dry in the sun without detriment to colour or quality.
Surely this is a goodly list of virtues, and the sum of them is by no means exhausted. Their durability is surprising; and they can be sewn together and stretched upon large floors with excellent colour effect. They can be turned or moved from room to room and place to place with a facility which makes them more than useful. The manufacture is so simple that a child might weave them, while at the same time, by a skilful use of colour and good arrangement of border, they can be made to fit the needs of the most luxurious as well as the simplest summer cottage. In short, they are capable of infinite variation and improvement, without departure from the simple method of the “prison rug.”
Of course the variation must be in colour and the arrangement of colour; and in studying this possible improvement it must be remembered that cotton will neither take nor hold dyes as readily as wool or silk, and that certain dyes which are very tenacious in their hold upon animal fibre cannot be depended upon when applied to vegetable fibre. There are, however, certain dyes upon which we can safely rely. Indigo blue, and the red used in dyeing what is called Turkey red, are reliable in application to both wool and cotton, and are water and sun proof as well. Walnut and butternut stains will give fast shades of brown and yellow, and in addition there is also the buff or nankeen-coloured cotton, the natural tint of which combines well with brown and blue.
In giving directions for rug colourings in cottons, I shall confine myself to the use of black, white, blue and red, because these colours are easily procurable, and also because rugs manufactured from them will fit the style of furnishing which demands cotton rugs.
The examples I shall give call for graduated dyeing, especially in the two tints of red and blue.
Any one expecting to succeed in rug weaving must be able to procure or produce from two to three planes of colour, as well as two mixtures in each. These would be as follows:
In blue:—1st, dark blue; 2d, medium blue; 3d, light blue.
After these three tints are secure, three variations of blue can be made by knotting the skeins more or less closely and throwing medium, light blue and white together into the dye-tub. Here they must remain until the white skeins show an outside of light blue; the light blue skeins are apparently changed to medium, and the medium to dark. When they are untied and dried they will show three clouded mixtures:
1st, the medium blue clouded with dark; 2d, light blue clouded with medium blue; 3d, white, clouded with light blue.
Here we have six variations of the one tint. Red can be treated in the same way, except that a rather light and a very dark red are all that can be counted upon safely as plain tints. A very light red will not hold. Therefore we have in reds:—1st, dark red; 2d, light red; 3d, light red, clouded with dark; 4th, white, clouded with light red.