Buying a rug in Jaipur: a visitor’s guide
How to shop for rugs in the city, what to ask in any showroom and how to ship one home.
A day in the dye yard
Before any knot is tied, the wool is washed, dyed and dried in small lots behind our showroom.
The dye yard sits behind our looms in Mansarovar. Most mornings it is the busiest part of Gaanth, and the one visitors ask to see.
The day starts at 7 with the wool. Hand-spun wool arrives from spinners near Bikaner in skeins, still with some natural lanolin. It is washed in warm water with a mild soap and hung to dry before it can take dye evenly.
By 9 the copper vats are heating. Our dyer, Ramesh, has been with us since 1997. He weighs the wool and the dye for every lot, writes the weights in a register and keeps a small skein of each lot on a hook. For madder red, the wool simmers for about an hour. For indigo, it is dipped and lifted again and again; it comes out green and turns blue as it meets the air.
The dyed skeins dry on bamboo poles in the sun. By late afternoon the yard is full of colour: rust, indigo, ochre, walnut brown, undyed ivory. We dye in small lots of 20 to 40 kg, so slight differences between lots are normal. On a large rug, the weavers mix skeins from the same lot to keep the colour even. Those faint bands of shade, called abrash, are a sign of hand-dyed wool, not a fault.
