Modern rugs can make a room feel homely and comfortable whilst adding taste to a room, much like owning a large rug by Henzel of Sweden. They excel in colour and art but also being practical- Henzel wool is durable and resilient but is also comfortable and safe. Henzel use the purest, cleanest, wool from New Zealand. The Henzel Studio is based in Gothenburg, Sweden. Their primary aim is to design and manufacture individual pieces of great originality.

http://www.byhenzel.com/catalogue.htm

NEL, an evolving collective of Mexican designers, commissioned this bespoke rug by Spanish rug and carpet company Nanimarquina. The large rug, aptly name Global Warming contrasts the comfort and softness of a bespoke rug with a thorny problem that is specific to our time. Following the age-old tradition of using wool rugs as a means for communication and a cultural record, NEL is portraying global warming in a scene that invites us to reflect on our impact on today’s world.

As I flick through many of the vogues and other fashion editorials I have sprawled in front of me I notice that every floor in every house that they feature have at least one rug on it. Many of the floors are tiled intricately with a persian, hand woven shaggy rug or sheepskin placed strategically on top. In the March 2008 edition of Vogue there is an article about a Normandy holiday home owned by Clarissa and Mike Pilkington, that was turned from rags to riches in just under 5 years.

Every one of their tiled or wooden floors is covered in one rug or even two. A top of these beautifully crafted persian and bespoke rugs is an antique table with trinket boxes filled to the brim with rose petals and broken jewellery. Even when the family leave for the beach they pack an old rug to sit on. Most of their hand crafted rugs are found in antique stores or flea markets, though a few are made especially for their holiday home.

You think you have big feet? Try Ain Dara in northern Syria where there are footprints three feet long and eighteen inches wide. They stand at the entrance to the remains of a neo(new)-Hittite temple – it’s not very new now – high up in a hill.
The hill is in the River Affrin valley, though what must have been a mighty river is just a stream now. When you walk along the path that winds to the top you can see the valley stretching out below, and you hear farming sounds – a tractor, a sheep – in the distance. There is also a surprise before you reach the top, but I’m not spoiling it for you here.

Finally I have my own Rugdesigner rug – it’s almost big enough to be called a carpet – and I love it! The border is solid bands of sand and chestnut colour, and there are two shades of green as well in the overall pattern. However the total effect comes from the background colour of cream, the natural colour of the wool (I’m told). In my eyes it adds elegance to the pale green living-room with its dark furniture.
But oh! The critics!
“Carpets should be darker than that.”
“It’ll show every mark.”
“What an impractical colour to put on the floor!”
I assure them that wool is very robust, and that most marks come off with the vacuum cleaner. I even joke that dark carpets aren’t any cleaner, you just can’t see the dirt. They are not convinced, and some even take their shoes off when they come in.
So what? I don’t care. I know it is practical, whatever they say. Anyway, as I said before, I love it.

Washing the Fleece

Sheep almost always live in the open air, and even the more primitive breeds no longer shed their wool at the end of the winter. This means that they get dirty – often VERY dirty – dusty, muddy and sweaty with lots of entangled bits and pieces. It must be such a relief to dash away from the shearer, free of all that weight, smell and heat. Rugs and carpets, however, be they modern or antique, smooth or shaggy, are expected to be pretty or smart colours and to lack that distinctive aroma that shouts ‘sheep!’

To bridge the gap, the first process towards your rug is scouring, which means washing and rinsing the wool to remove most of the impurities, from sweat to bits of twig. In some breeds (the very sweaty ones) this can reduce the weight of the fleece by up to 50%, but the wool usually used for Designerug rugs and carpets loses only about 25 – 30% of weight in this process – so you know that your shaggy rug may have come from a shaggy sheep, but at least it hasn’t come from a very smelly one!

Scouring, in the case of wool, means gently washing in a detergent mixture, then rinsing until it is free of dirt and detergent both. The wool is usually passed through a series of long, narrow tanks on a belt. Each tank is equipped with a set of gently moving paddles to keep the water moving without tangling the wool. The first tank contains the cleaning mixture, which rapidly becomes extremely dirty. After that, it is pressed through rollers to remove as much water as is possible without turning the whole thing into felt. Then the belt moves it along, in and out of rinsing baths, each rinse being followed by a further gentle pressing. By the fifth bath the cleaning materials have been washed out and the wool looks bright and clean, and shows a surprising range of shades, from palest cream to beige. Of course, there are also black sheep, but their wool is separated out before the scouring. The final process is drying and fluffing, which happens as the belt moves through an oven and the wool is dried with jets of very warm air. Now it is ready for the next stage – the spinning.

Spinning the Wool

Blending.  Ideally, all the spun wool will be a standard colour so the dyer will be able to judge quickly how to produce that puce you chose for your designerug pattern. Unfortunately the sheep are not too interested in that part of the job, and their coats vary over a surprising range, according to age, diet and specialized breeding.

The Blender is the man who sorts that problem out, judging by sight which bales of washed wool have to be dumped into the big blending bin (like an enormous mixing bowl, with paddles) to give an even-coloured yarn at the end. In the blending bin the wool is tossed and stirred to mix up all the different bales of wool, but carefully enough to avoid tangling them. This makes sure that there won’t be darker or lighter lengths in the final yarn. At the same time, a special oil is added to the wool to avoid what could be a dangerous build-up of static electricity as thee wool is processed (most of this oil comes off onto the machines themselves, and the rest is removed in the dyeing process). The man who works as a blender has a very dusty job, although the wool has been washed, and a mask is a necessary part of his equipment.

Early men almost certainly used animal skins to keep the chill off their feet – and the rest of their bodies. One day, a housewife was tidying up the cave again, and she collected all the shreds of wool and fur that had fallen off the skins. Being of a saving disposition, she stashed the bits in a corner and carried on. The same thing happened most days, and she continued to push the loose threads into the corner.
Eventually, when the skins were pretty well bare, she threw them out and demanded her husband get some new ones. He complained (of course), but went off with his buddies, their clubs over their shoulders, to see what they could bash.
While they were away, the housewife wanted something soft for the baby to sit on, so she pulled out the large bundle of wool and settled the baby on it near the fire. Was she annoyed when the baby did what babies do, and she had to put the warm, wet, squashed wool outside the cave! The surprise came the next day, when the damp lump had become a thick, soft pad (though smelling strongly of baby).
After that, she collected the wool and fur more carefully and each time she had a bundle big enough, she sat the baby on it, producing another pad of felt, so in a fairly short time she had enough for a rug for everyone to sit on. The idea caught on, and the demand grew for loose wool – and babies, until one day a housewife with a strong sense of smell tried spilling hot water on the wool instead, and felt was born that could be used in any shape to make all sorts of large and small rugs.

Once upon a time there was a king of Persia, who was also a god and had to make sure his land was fertile and fruitful. I don’t know how successful he was, but he certainly knew how to impress people with his power and potency. His name was King Chosroes and he lived round the beginning of the 7th century A.D.

When kings or ambassadors visited him, they were taken to a state room where the enormous curtains were drawn back to flood with light the fabled large rug of silk called The Spring of Chosrow. Sadly, it has not survived, but reports of it leave us a marvellous picture.

It was around 25.6 metres square, representing a formal garden, with water courses, paths, rectangular flower beds filled with flowers, and blossoming shrubs and fruit trees. Gold represented yellow gravel, while pearls and different jewels made the blossoms, fruit and birds. The word ‘paradise’ comes ultimately from the Persian word for ‘an enclosed garden’, and the shaped rug had a wide outer border representing a meadow – made of emeralds close enough together to form a solid band.

It wouldn’t match the decoration in my house – what a pity!

The Iranians want to concentrate on the high quality end of the carpet and rug market, because there are so many cheap copies of Persian rugs floating around these days. This sounds like the sort of high quality rug that your children will be glad you bought, but if you think that’s just what you want, you’re going to have to wait your turn.

Traditionally, mosques don’t have chairs inside, though these days there are probably a few at the side for the elderly. Worshippers take off their shoes before going in, then usually they sit or kneel on a rug to say their prayers, chat or eat their packed lunch. On a hot day in Damascus the interior of the Omayyid mosque, one of the oldest in the world, is a place to read holy books, or to pray, or just to take the weight off your feet and feed the baby. Comfort comes from the rugs spread all over the floor. In the Omayyid mosque some of them are very old, and others new gifts of worshippers, but all are in traditional patterns and blend into a pleasant whole.

Now remember that the people who are building mosques now are as enthusiastic as the European Cathedral builders of old, and you won’t be surprised to hear that mosques are getting bigger and fancier wherever it is affordable. One of the ways of improving on old designs is to have a specially woven, and very large, rug to replace the random gifts of rugs, to give a unity of design.

The largest rug in the world up to now has been that in the Sultan Quaboos Mosque in Muscat, on the Persian Gulf. It is 4,400 square metres, and is now being overtaken by a new rug for the Sheikh Zayed Mosque of Abu Dhabi. This will be nearly 6,000 square metres and will take 2,000 weavers around 14 months to weave. It will weigh 35 tons when finished, so can you imagine how they are going to deliver it? It is also going to be something of a specialist job unrolling it – no question of ‘a bit of a tweak to the right and it will be straight’!

The barge she sat on, like a burnished throne Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold.
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that the winds were lovesick with them.
Cleopatra’s silken bed would have been laid over a large rug or carpet. The ancient Egyptians made rugs out of the materials to hand – in their case, papyrus. They dyed it in bright colours – yellows, reds and blues – and wove floor and wall coverings from it. The word ‘papyrus’ has given us ‘paper’, so would this qualify the Egyptian rugs on the walls as the first ‘wallpaper’?

A large rug – antique Persian – a small child – a bottle of ink – disaster!
I saw it falling, leapt towards it. The blue ink splashed through my fingers onto the muted greys of the beautiful Persian rug, soaking into it as fast as if the fine wool had been blotting paper. I grabbed it up from the floor and rushed to the nearby bathroom to wash the ink out. Fortunately, before turning on the tap I paused to think. The rug was a loan from my mother-in-law’s collection of valuable large and small Persian rugs, and she might know what to do. I collected the children and the rug and struggled down to her flat below to apologise and ask for help.
She took one look at the rug, spread it over her dining table and assembled her materials: a dry cloth and a bucket of yoghurt. First she wiped the rug until no more ink would come off onto the cloth, then she spread a thick coating of yoghurt over the stain. The yoghurt rapidly turned blue and she scraped it off – it was like magic.
Over the next few days she repeated the process until all sign of the stain had gone, then rubbed the area with a soap-laden damp cloth a few times to get rid of the yoghurt. She didn’t lend me the rug again!