The First Thirty Days With a New Handmade Rug
After it arrives · 22 April 2026 · 5 min · Published by Raheem & Son for RS Living
Shedding, creases, a faint smell of wool and a pile that will not lie flat. Everything a new handmade rug does in its first month, and which of it needs doing something about.
Week one: creases and the smell of wool
Your rug has been rolled around a core, wrapped, and in a container or a van for some weeks. It arrives with the memory of that roll in it.
Lay it out face up in the position it will live in and leave it. Most creases fall out under their own weight within a week. If a corner or an edge insists on lifting, weight it with something flat and heavy, books work well, and leave that for a few days. Warmth helps, so a rug laid in a room that gets afternoon sun will relax faster than one in a cold hallway.
Never iron a wool pile and never fold a handmade rug for storage. If you must move it later, roll it, pile facing outward.
A new wool rug also smells faintly of wool, and sometimes of the lanolin still in the fibre. It is not damp and it is not a chemical. It disperses in a ventilated room within a week or two.
Weeks one to six: shedding
This is the thing that worries people most and needs the least action.
Spinning and shearing leave short loose fibres inside the pile. They work their way to the surface as you walk on it and they come out. On a hand-tufted rug with a dense cut pile, the first few vacuums can produce a startling amount of fluff. It is not the rug losing structure, the knots and the tufts holding it together are not going anywhere.
Vacuum gently, without a beater bar, once or twice a week for the first month. Shedding drops off sharply after four to six weeks and settles to almost nothing. It never quite reaches zero on a wool rug, and that is true of every wool rug ever made.
The things worth acting on
Sprouts. Occasionally a single tuft sits proud of the surface. Cut it level with scissors. Do not pull it, because pulling can bring a length of yarn with it.
Movement. A rug that slides on a hard floor is a trip hazard and it wears unevenly at the edges. A pad fixes it and also adds a great deal to how the rug feels underfoot.
Furniture. Heavy legs crush the pile. Move the rug or the furniture a few centimetres every few months, or use wide coasters, and the pile recovers rather than compressing permanently.
Sun. Direct, sustained sunlight fades any dye, natural or synthetic. If a strip of your rug sits in a beam of afternoon sun, rotate the rug end to end twice a year so it ages evenly instead of in one bleached stripe.
What not to do in the first month
Do not have it professionally cleaned. There is nothing to clean, and a wet clean on a rug that has not settled is the fastest way to distort it.
Do not soak a spill. Blot from the outside of the spill inwards with a white cloth, and keep blotting with clean water. Rubbing pushes the spill into the foundation and can felt the wool. Care and cleaning has the full method.
Do not judge the colour on day one, in one light. Give it a week and look at it morning and evening before deciding it is not what you expected.
Questions
How long does a new wool rug shed for?
Four to six weeks of noticeable shedding, tailing off to very little after that. Dense cut piles shed more at first than flatweaves, which shed almost not at all.
How do I get the creases out of a new rug?
Lay it flat, face up, and wait. Most creases release within a week under the rug's own weight. Weight stubborn corners with something flat and heavy. Do not iron it and do not fold it.
Should I vacuum a new handmade rug?
Yes, gently and with the beater bar off or lifted. A beater bar on a new hand-tufted pile pulls fibres out faster than they would come naturally.
My new rug smells of wool. Is something wrong?
No. That is lanolin and the natural smell of the fibre. It goes in a week or two in a ventilated room. A sour or musty smell is different and is worth telling us about.
