We, too, have a rug that kinda tied the room together

We too have a rug that kinda tied the room together…and it is suddenly deteriorating over the past couple of months. And I didn’t think it was moths. But what was causing it?

For anyone who’s interested in learning a little bit about hand-knotted Orientals that aren’t what they seem to be, the in-laws gave us ten years ago a rug they’d purchased that they were told was new except for one woman who’d owned it for a month or so then returned it as she decided she couldn’t pay for it and so it was being sold at a reduced price. The past couple of months the pile has started coming away in a spot and didn’t look like moth damage, then accelerated and underneath had the feeling of hard concretized glue. I realized there was a 4 by 2 in area which was now much stiffer than the remainder of the rug and more pile was coming away in another spot in that area showing crumbled glue underneath. I took photos and sent them to an expert and he wrote back saying that my suspicions were correct, that it was a latex repair job, he’d seen quite a bit of it as it used to be common to do.

The expert says that a latex repair job renders the rug worthless as you can’t reweave it because of the hardened latex…which I’d already realized last night as I tried sticking a pin through the concretized area and it was so hard that the pin wouldn’t go through. I also discovered, with my intense scrutiny of the underside, a barely noticeable one inch darning job elsewhere on the rug.

Anyway, it was an interesting and educational experience researching all of this before I determined it was possibly latex and contacted the expert to see what he thought.