- Key People:
- William Morris
- Erastus Brigham Bigelow
- Related Topics:
- knitted carpet
- Wilton carpet
- velvet carpet
- tufted carpet
- kellegi
rug and carpet
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What is a rug or carpet?
A rug or carpet is a decorative textile made of thick material, typically used as a floor covering. The words rug and carpet are often used interchangeably. However, a carpet is usually tacked down to cover an entire floor, while a rug is a partial floor covering that is not fastened down.
Most carpets are made of sheep’s wool because it is durable, dyes easily, and is easy to work with. However, other materials like cotton, silk, linen, hemp and jute can also be used. Handmade carpets have long been considered works of art. Oriental carpets are often classified based on their country or region of origin, such as Persian or Chinese.
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How are rugs and carpets different from each other?
Rugs and carpets are both decorative textiles made of thick material and intended as floor coverings. The term carpet was once used for any cover, such as a table cover, but is now used almost exclusively for floor coverings. The word rug is often used to describe a partial floor covering, while a carpet is often tacked down to the floor, typically covering the entire floor. However, the terms are used interchangeably when referring to handmade carpets.
Most carpets are made of sheep’s wool because it is durable, dyes easily, and handles without issue. Carpets serve both practical and aesthetic functions.
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What materials are commonly used to make rugs and carpets?
Carpets and rugs are made from a variety of materials, with sheep's wool being the most common due to its durability and ability to readily accept dyes. Other materials include:
- Wool Camel and goat hair are rarely used.
- Cotton Its strength makes it ideal for the warp (vertical yarns of the foundation). It is often used in the East for the entire foundation or just the warp.
- Silk Because of its high cost, silk is restricted to luxurious and delicate rugs.
- Linen Used in Egyptian carpets.
- Hemp Used for the foundations of Indian carpets.
- Jute Since around 1820, it has been used in the foundation of machine-made carpets.
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How are rugs and carpets made?
Rugs and carpets are typically made of sheep's wool because it is durable, dyes easily, and is easy to handle, but other materials such as camel hair, goat wool, cotton, silk, linen, hemp, and jute can also be used.
Machine-made carpets are named after the looms used or the construction method, such as Wilton, ingrain, or Brussels. Tufted carpets are made by inserting tufts through a prewoven backing with needles. Looms, including power looms, greatly reduce the time and labor needed to manufacture carpets. Some carpets have a knotted pile, which is constructed on a loom on a foundation of woven yarns.
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What are some traditional uses and cultural meanings of rugs and carpets in different countries?
Carpets and rugs have diverse traditional uses and cultural meanings across countries. In Central and western Asia, they served as floor coverings in homes, tents, mosques, and palaces. Wealthy Eastern families used them for both practical and aesthetic purposes, arranging them in traditional patterns. Prayer rugs, or namāzlik, feature designs linked to religious imagery, like the mihrab pointing towards Mecca.
In Europe, Asian carpets were initially precious items displayed on walls or furniture rather than floors. Scandinavia has a rich tradition of handmade floor coverings, including rya rugs with geometric designs, some used as opulent "wedding carpets". Mughal carpets from India, made for emperors in the 16th and 17th centuries, showcased distinct Indian designs, such as scenic and animal themes. Cairene rugs from Egypt, dating back to the 15th century, featured geometric patterns and were exported to southern Europe. European folk art also widely incorporates carpet making, with traditional designs passed down through generations.
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rug and carpet, any decorative textile normally made of a thick material and now usually intended as a floor covering. Until the 19th century the word carpet was used for any cover, such as a table cover or wall hanging; since the introduction of machine-made products, however, it has been used almost exclusively for a floor covering. Both in Great Britain and in the United States the word rug is often used for a partial floor covering as distinguished from carpet, which frequently is tacked down to the floor and usually covers it wall-to-wall. In reference to handmade carpets, however, the names rug and carpet are used interchangeably.
Handmade carpets are works of art as well as functional objects. Indeed, many Oriental carpets have reached such heights of artistic expression that they have been held in the same regard in the East as objects of exceptional beauty and luxury that masterpieces of painting have been in the West.
Elements of design
Field and border designs
Designs usually consist of an inner field—the pattern in the centre of the carpet—and a border. The latter serves, like the cornice on a building or the frame on a picture, to emphasize the limits, isolate the field, and sometimes control the implied movements of the interior pattern. The design of inner field and border must harmonize pleasingly, yet remain distinct.
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The border consists of a minimum of three elements: a main band, which varies greatly in width according to the size of the rug and the elaborateness of the field design, and inner and outer guard stripes, subordinate bands on either side of the main band. The guard stripes may be the same on both sides of the main band or be different. The most common decoration for the field is an allover pattern, a panel composition, or a medallion system. The allover pattern may be of identical repeats (see ), either juxtaposed or evenly spaced, though the latter, while common on textiles, is rare on carpets; or it may be of varied motifs in a unified system (e.g., different plant forms of about the same size), but even this freest type of design almost invariably includes bilaterally balanced repetitions. The varied motif type of design is found most typically in garden carpets, formalized representations of the parks or woods that were a feature of Persian palace grounds.
Another type of allover design appears to be entirely free but is actually organized on systems of scrolling stems, notably on the east Persian carpets of the 16th and 17th centuries.
The value of panel subdivisions for controlling patterns had been discovered in a simple rectangular version by the Upper Paleolithic Period (c. 40,000 bc), and panel systems have been a basic form of design since 4000 bc, when pottery painters were already devising varied systems. On carpets, the lattice provides the simplest division of the field, often a diagonal lattice as appears on an embroidered carpet found in an excavated tomb (1st century bc–1st century ad) at Noin Ula in northern Mongolia; the diagonal scheme also appears on Sāsānian capitals and in Coptic tapestries. But a characteristic field design of the Persian court carpets of the Shāh ʿAbbās period, the so-called vase pattern, is constructed from the ogee, a motif that became prominent in Middle Eastern textile design in the 14th century. Simple rectangular paneling—really a large-scale check—is typical of one style of Spanish rugs of the 15th and 16th centuries.
The most frequent medallion composition consists of a more or less elaborate motif superimposed on the centre of a patterned field and often complemented with cornerpieces, which are typically quadrants of the central medallion (see ). But multiple-medallion systems also are used: either a succession or a chain of medallions on the vertical axis; two or more forms of medallions alternating in bands, a scheme typical of the Turkish (Ushak) carpets of the 16th and 17th centuries; or systematically spotted medallions that may or may not be interconnected or that may interlock so that the scheme becomes an elaborate lattice.
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Persian carpets of the 15th–17th century commonly have multiple-design schemes; that is, composition systems with elements that relate on two or more levels. The simplest is the medallion superimposed on an allover design, but more typical are subtler inventions such as two- or three-spiral stem systems, sometimes overlain with large-scale cloud bands, all intertwining but each carried independently to completion. The finer vase carpets have double or triple ogival lattices set at different intervals (staggered), each with its own centre, and tangent motifs that also serve other functions in the other systems. What at first sight appears to be a great multiplicity of independent motifs thus proves on careful examination to be ingeniously contrived and firmly controlled.
Occasionally, stripe systems are used, either vertical or diagonal, but this conception is more natural to shuttlewoven fabrics, and, when employed in the freer techniques of rug weaving, it is probably an imitation of textiles.