Rug and carpet construction types

Simply put, rug or carpet construction is a particular way of putting it together. Whether produced by hand, or by machine, they are made in a certain way. This includes all that is done to come up with a finished product: from tufting or weaving the yarn to dyeing and applying chemical or other treatments.

However, rug/carpet construction types are based primarily on its face fiber placement technic. According to it, rugs and carpets come either as tufted, needle-punched or woven. The latter construction type is rarely used for carpets, being time-consuming and pricey to produce. Weaving is mostly used in rug making, for making knotted, flat-weave and braided area rugs.

Tufted rug and carpets are made by needles inserting loops of yarn into the cloth foundation. Needle-punched rugs/carpets are made by punching the yarn laid onto the backing through it by a dense array of needles, and woven by weaving the yarn into foundation strands. Cloth foundation holding the face fiber is called primary backing.

Not all area rugs need backing. For instance, braided rugs are constructed by plaiting and stitching braids together; that alone gives to a rug sturdiness needed for even very heavy use.

Tufted carpets and rugs can have face loops left intact (loop-pile rugs), sheared (cut-pile rugs), or combined. The pile can be looped (most commercial carpets), or sheared evenly, for a flat top surface, or selectively high and low, creating sculptured patterns.

Needle-punched carpets and rugs are thick, felt-like coverings, good for heavy traffic areas.

Woven carpets and rugs also come in a number of variations. Carpets most often come as knitted, Wilton, Velvet or Axminster. The three main rug construction types here are knotted, flat-weave and braided.

All these face fiber construction methods have somewhat different general properties in regard to pattern flexibility, bulk, weight and durability. You can follow the above links for more specific information on that, as well as other construction attributes, such as yarn form, density and treatments.

Also, area rugs are either hand-made, or machine-made, with some general differences between the two.

Certain rug/carpet face construction techniques - tufting in particular - require (or benefit from) adhering of the so-called "secondary" backing to the underside. It secures the face fiber and adds dimensional stability to a rug.

An important part of rug and carpet construction is its face fiber dyeing technique. Together with fiber type, it determines how good is rug/carpet inherent color retention. Finally, face fiber inherent properties - resilience, stain, soil, static, flame and bacterial resistance - can be enhanced by various fiber treatments.
 

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