Shopping for Antique Rugs, With Rajiv Surendra

[Music] [Music] I'm here with Kim Reed who specializes in antique oriental rugs and you might think oh it's just a rug no Kim you know that these are not just rugs right every single knot was done by hand right right so one of the things with old rugs is their pieces of art so when I look at rugs I look at them as [Music] art Kim how did you get into this well when I was young yeah my first husband's best friend was a rug dealer up in Cambridge Massachusetts and he actually made a loom for me and I made two little rugs you wo them yes I nodded and wo so the first rug was 20 in sorry excuse it gets dusty here and you get allergies yeah sorry Kim you you've woven yes I uh no made the term nodded nodded right the rugs when they make them you have a frame mhm mhm and the warping goes around the frame MH okay so this is your warp Yep this goes around the frame yep okay this is your weft this goes in between each row so when they make it they're putting in the wefting pounding it down and then they're tying one row of knots so on the front you see the head of the knot right there's the head of the knot here's your tail that's the pile and you did that yes small small 20 in x 24 in it took me 3 months for each one to do um but I was happy with that and I learned how to do restoration you know by doing that uh vegetable dy I did that because the old rugs had the vegetable dyes you really have the experience of of how these rugs have actually been made yes I was I suspected that when we started talking mhm because the way you were talking about the rugs I it sounded like oh you're very familiar with their construction so i' I I worked at a historic site where we had sheep and we we we did the we sheep shearing and we would dye the Wool with all the natural dyes there you go all these colors are vegetable dyes they're vegetable dyes there's some that aren't and I would I point that out to my customers I tell them exactly what they're getting say like this rug over here right yeah this rug here when was has this made this is 1890s 1890s wow so this is this is over 130 years old yes all vegetable colors what are can you walk us through what the what what the colors are and where they came from the blues are all Indigo both of these yes Indigo the the variation in the tone is this soaked longer as opposed to this right and then this this red which is kind of a common color that we see the rusty readyy orangey color what's that matter matter and matter is a root right matter is a root what's this yellow well they used weld weld saffron can also be used and you get different degrees of tone depending on how long you let it soak and then this right here that's the natural color of the sheep which I love this is this is undyed wool that's beautiful now the other color that's hard to find is green really yes and the tricky part with green is it's an overdye oh go in yellow yes you don't get uh green vegetation and it's going to produce a green color okay it's going to have to be Indigo and then a yellow which would have been the the weld or the saffron I've never really thought about this but you don't see a lot of green in rugs it's more labor intensive okay so you've done work to this rug right so what I do is if this rug would be in really good condition y it would be a couple thousand okay it has wear it had loose areas y so what I did and I'll flip it to the back oh wow okay so I basically stitched down the loose areas yes I sell this for 650 so this is considerably cheaper yes because of the condition and and the repair work that has been done right I I love the fact that you shared with us your proc of getting into this because this is what I tell people these rugs vary in price they're it's all over the place and if you don't know anything about rugs you might walk into a rug store and you might be daunted by the price of a rug but you can find rugs at flea markets or or sales or even coming coming right to you yes and you can find a rug that you can afford as a starter rug yes yes um and you want to do your research y so anybody who's going to spend money on a rug and I'll say it can be expensive you you want to know what you're buying yeah and you want to know is it within reason antique rugs are always desirable yeah so they always command a high price but my business is based on reasonable cost to people $650 you can pay that for a new rug and it's it's not worth anything like the knew y rugs are garbage rugs I did because because because of the quality and this is this is why I really like talking to someone like you who is an authority in this field because this is what people don't know they might say oh but this rug is so heavy I want a lightweight rug because it's easier to pick up and move around you don't want a lightweight rug it's going to move around on the floor and it's probably lightweight because the wool is poor quality so it's going to shed and it's it's just it's crap right so you do get lightweight rugs in 19th century pieces such as this because it's Caucasian the tribal pieces were made for themselves it was in a tent and they had to be flexible so they could fold them up hold one second Sor yeah this this the car is going to run you over these rugs you know we see them now we see them in magazines we see them in people's homes but people have been using rugs all over the world for many hundreds of years I I saw medieval painting the other day and it it was the Virgin Mary I think it was from 1200 or 1300 and in the back was an oriental rug and I thought wow there's a rug back there that they painted because at that time this was a prized possession it was it was but it hasn't changed the rug looked exactly like this so in a thousand years the the the design of these things hasn't changed and that speaks to there inherent Beauty yes they treated their rugs very well so but the Caucasian pieces and tribal pieces had to be a Woolen foundation so they could fold it up easily yeah and transport cuz they're breaking down they're going nomic they're nomadic so the rugs have a tradition and a culture behind them that uh most people will look at them and say it's just beautiful yeah but there's a lot more going on there's such a rich history that goes back over a thousand years I heard something that I I'm very intrigued to ask you because I wonder if it's a myth someone said that in in some of those regions where these are made they actually washed them in the ocean they took them to the seashore and allowed the water to lap away the dirt right because it because the waves just laying it on the shore so rugs like this with the vegetable colors you can wash yeah for a rug to be healthy you have to be able to wash it really yes think about it if it's down here's your foundation yeah dirt cut here's your pile but if they don't clean it y the dirt starts pushing down into the foundation it will get stiff it will actually start breaking the foundation over time that's why the new rugs which we have used the garbage word on you can't wash them these things are things people bought and they had for their entire lives and they died and their children inherited them and they're valued and look where they end up they end up in a booth like this where you and I find them and they're still valuable it's because it was made to last exactly and it was made with care I mean the amount of work that went into this would blow our minds today if we if we could see the work that went into shearing the Sheep raising the Sheep collecting the Dy material in these little huts with dirt floors where these were made I don't think we would actually believe what we were seeing and I love that you know this and I love that you appreciate this because I know like I've sat at a spinning wheel and I've toiled over a diod and I know what it takes to create just one ske of yarn and when I see these rugs like it does it moves me inside because I all these people are gone that made these but they their rugs still stay there and the beauty of their work is still here I look at hundreds of rugs when I buy I can see the person who made it there's a character to them and I see that person did the maker design the pattern or was the pattern designed by somebody else it's tradition so certain elements would be used on a consistent basis mhm for that area or or that tribe over here this is a hamadan right yes okay okay so how I look at tribal rugs yes tribal rugs are out in the country okay okay yeah hamans are not the city rugs but they're the suburbs the city rugs are where the very finely done rugs are that's TBR isvan very finely done very expensive the suburbs were less money so this kind of rug did not cost as much as say this rug this rug yes this is a seru and you can you can see the difference I mean the wool is coarser this is this has a Sheen almost this is wool right but it looks almost kind of silky right it's a good quality wool and this was expensive when it was made wealthy people bought it and you can see side by side the knots are so much smaller right than these knots so you said something really interesting Kim about the location that this this was sort of like a suburbian rugs forgive my ignorance hamadan that's a region it's a region in Persia like a okay so it's an area the hamadan region it's a village a village it's a village so when we identify rugs T Brees Isfahan sus there is actually towns with those names is there a town called suuk yes and suuk is like a bigger produce suuk it's tradition as to the exact kind of rug that they made okay so we can say kind of like town or city town or city suburb can we have one example of like tribe where it's like out in rural areas so that okay I I'll bring that over like this is really fascinating I think just to have them side by side in terms of regional and cultural right town city suburbs rural tribal rug yes so this this is something that would have been made with the intention of potentially putting it down right on a packed dirt floor yes yes this is for their tent really yes and these rugs were so collected at the turn of the century wealthy people mhm were going over there and buying 18th century rugs they they were always sought after that's how I feel about them I mean when I saw your booth from way over there I was like I don't think I can focus on anything else I need to go over there [Music] so Kim this little rug you've already cleaned but if someone was to find something like me I found little rugs like this that have been really filthy how what's the best way to actually clean something like this so what I do with all my rugs I will use a bathtub hot water and I put them in the bathtub and I soaked them you actually submer merge the whole rug in water yes really it is soaked in hot water and depending on its dirt it can be hours of soaking and working with the rug to help release the dirt so I use Simple Green uh Murphy's Oil MH and it depends on just how bad the dirt is on the rug that's why when you feel this it feels nice and soft and clean and it also feels very flexible in the found how do you put the rug into the water like do you so what I do is I turn it like this Y and then once it's soaked and it's completely saturated yes I start rolling it like this yep and then like you do bread and you knead it I roll it like this in the water in the water so what you're doing is you're you're opening up the pile so the dirt can get released and it depends on how dirty it is how long I have to soak the rug to get that Foundation dirt out so the rug is soaked with water how do you get the water out of the rug I roll it very tight y in the water and it's it's soaking wet right now y in the water smge hand goes here hand goes up like this y you just park it it's going to drain and you let let it drain overnight it's going to drain on its own yep you don't have to like squeeze really no and and so you leave it like this overnight yep and then the next day you want a sunny day you put it out yep you want a flat surface and you want uh not the ground you can put a tarp out uh a wooden deck is fine yes and you just keep it like this so the front side is down yep back side is up the Sun is going to draw the water up through the backside any any residue will come to the backside I I didn't I would be so scared to put this in water you should be okay because you can get into major trouble if you don't know rugs and you don't know their age and you don't know vegetable colors you can have a new rug again new rugs they have colors that can be bleeders and you're dies chemical dieses are you saying do not try this at home exactly if you don't know rugs and you don't know what the rug is and you don't know what you're doing you're going to have trouble okay well that that I think is an important part of this don't just go around your apartment now and start putting your rugs in the bathtub who knows what will happen and I've seen that I've seen rugs where it's all like all the colors have bled and then like at a sale where I'm like what happened to that thing oh we know what happened we know what happened this has been so fascinating so meaningful this little rug is coming home to New York with me thank you so much for your time today can I give you a hug sure this has been so wonderful thank you appreciate it [Music] [Music]

Channel: HGTV Handmade

Views: 31,987

Keywords: hgtv, handmade, antique shopping, thrifting, antique rugs, oriental rugs, rajiv surendra

Id: _8oHXHVUHGk

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2024