Rug making techniques

One of the arts of rug making is to ensure an ideal marriage between the wool and the canvas foundation; too little wool will produce a loose and floppy rug and too much bulges the filled holes in the canvas at the expense of the adjoining unfilled holes, making work increasingly difficult and tending to distort the shape of the finished rug and to prevent it lying flat on the floor.

The Farmyard rug (Fig. 2) is an example of an unhappy alliance. This was worked during 1944-5 with various oddments of wool on too soft a piece of canvas (5 holes to the inch).

With the rather thick wool, which was all that was available at the time, two lengths used together in the needle proved to be too much for satisfactory working (see above), so a change was made to a single length.