Cotton
Turn over any handmade rug and you meet the fibre nobody talks about. The pile gets the compliments; cotton does the engineering.
A boll opens
Cotton begins as a boll of fibre around the seed. Ginned, cleaned, carded and combed, those short fibres are spun into strong, even thread — the most dimensionally honest natural fibre available, which is exactly what a rug's foundation needs.
Strength in numbers
Single strands are twisted together into plied warp yarn — the counts weavers here call tana. A plied cotton warp resists stretching and holds tension identically across three metres of loom, so the rug that comes off is the shape the rug was meant to be.
Hundreds of parallel promises
Before a single knot is tied, warp threads are measured, counted and strung on the loom under even tension. Every knot in the rug will be tied around these threads; every fringe you will ever see is their ends. Get the warp wrong and no amount of beautiful pile can save the piece — which is why our loom-setting is a specialist's job, not an apprentice's.
For the life of the rug
In the finished rug, cotton lies hidden inside, keeping the piece flat, square and stable through years of use and cleaning. The best compliment a warp ever receives is that nobody notices it.
- PLIED TANA WARP
- DIMENSIONAL STABILITY
- EVERY HANDMADE RUG