Cleaning Silk Rugs

Cleaning silk rugs safely requires the rug cleaner to have a significant level of expertise. Most cleaners wisely refrain from cleaning them.

The very fine fibers and yarns allow the weaver to create intricate details in the design. The typical pile is soft and lustrous. And the nature of the fiber is such that the clean silk yarns can appear to have an iridescent glow.

However, there are a few drawbacks to silk rugs. Because the yarns are so fine, child labor is often used to weave them. And although very strong, the yarn does not does not withstand abrasion as well as wool.

The biggest challenge for the rug cleaner can be unstable dyes. In general, silk does not hold on to dye as readily as wool. So it takes a high degree of expertise on the part of the craftsman dyeing silk to make it “stick. Some silk rugs, woven in locations that historically produce high quality hand knotted wool rugs, are notorious for the unstable dyes used in their production.

But silk is an absorbent fiber so a silk rug needs to be washed to be clean. So the rug cleaner needs to know how to mitigate dye migration in the washing and drying procedures.