Hand knotted, Hand Tufted and Machine Made Rugs

I came across with so many customers who are confused between hand knotted , hand tufted and machine made rugs.

Here are some brief description that I come out to educate people.

Hand knotted rugs are made from wool or silk or combination of both. These material also there is more to tell. I will discuss them later on. As it was said "hand knotted" that's mean made by hand started from designing, make the thread yarn , dye, knotting in the looms, crushed or cut the pile, wash the rugs, and drying them in the sun . There are several style to do the knots. It can be Persian knots, Tibetan knots, Jaipur knots and now a days the most famous are Ziegler or Chobbi. The knots also comes in different quality. Quality in rugs is determine by how many knots of wool they used to make the rugs.

Hand tufted rugs are also made from wool or silk or combination of both. The same in hand knotted they are made by hand, but unlike hand knotted they are not knotting. Instead they used hand glue gun to attached the yarn into a backing (usually cotton backing). Therefore hand tufted are much less expensive than the hand knotted.

Machine Made rugs are made from synthetic such as polypropylene, nylon, viscose (also known as artificial silk), but you can also find wool machine made rugs. They all made in the computerise machine. Therefore machine made rugs size are always standard, such as 4x6, 5x8, 7x10 and 8x11, you can find few of them in 10x13. (unlike hand knotted as they are made by human hand they can be vary in sizes, either few inches here and there) In North America, the sizes for hand knotted rugs are different from European market, the size are 4x6, 6x9,8x10 and 9x12, some places also carry larger size. Both machine and hand also available in round and rectangular.