rug 101

What is Color Variations or Abrash Effect in Hand-knotted Rugs

• 12 August 2020
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• 2 Min Read
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• By Jaipur Rugs

A hand-knotted rug is a work of art that starts its journey as a bundle of wool that gets hand-spun…

A hand-knotted rug is a work of art that starts its journey as a bundle of wool that gets hand-spun into yarn on a rudimentary spinning wheel. This hand-spun yarn is then dyed into various colors and used for weaving exquisite hand-knotted carpets. Because of this, the rug will always have certain disparities in their surface coloring, known as “Abrash coloration in hand knotted rugs” is one of the most common characteristics of a real hand-knotted rug.

One unique characteristic of hand-spun yarn is that the yarn is of different diameters because it is not made with a machine and therefore it holds the same color differently in different places. This variation in color, shades, and hues that one gets to see when the hand-spun yarn is used in a carpet is known as Abrash (pronounced ‘Ah-brash’) effect.

If you pick any antique rug, you will see this as a standard feature on them from the time when machines were not around.

The best way to identify a hand-knotted rug with an Abrash effect is to look for gradation in the colour tone of a single color across the rug. A machine-made rug will never be able to bring out the true abrash effect in a rug. This is a major difference in handmade vs machine-made rugs.

Examples of Abrash rugs

The word Abrash, in Farsi, means rainbow or spectrum. In the olden days, it was used to identify the variations in the colour of a rug’s pile. Jaipur Rugs offers a number of hand-knotted pieces with an Abrash effect. Certain pieces from the Project Error, Aakar, and Chaos Theory collections by designer Kavi have a beautiful abrash effect.

Significance of abrash effect

If you see a rug with an Abrash effect it instantly signifies that the rug has been made using hand-spun wool. This means that the rug is end-to-end done only by hand and is a unique masterpiece. The hand-spun batches of yarn took on the different gradations of the same color and over the years each batch will fade out differently and the effect will stand out as a unique characteristic.

For the untrained eye, this effect in handmade rugs can be seen as an anomaly or a defect. But it is not so. When buying a high-quality hand-knotted rug it is important to note that the presence of the abrash effect is sometimes a part of the design and it only signifies the purity of the hand-made process that has gone behind creating it. In other words, when you decide to buy rugs online with this effect you are choosing to buy a true work of art handmade from scratch.