The Alchemy of Natural Dyes: Exploring Sustainable Rug-Making Practices

Obeetee has a rich heritage in the preservation of art. With over a hundred years of expertise in the traditional techniques of handcrafting exquisite carpets, our efforts to ensure technical proficiency and constant innovation have also served to preserve natural, sustainable practices that are as good for the environment as they are for you. If you’ve been looking for inspiration for your New Year’s resolutions, you’ve come to the right place because sustainable practice and a healthy, happy life go hand-in-hand with the Obeetee way of life.

As leaders in the production of traditional handmade crafts, Obeetee’s wide range of furnishings and furniture are designed to suit every need - from meeting your aesthetic goals to addressing design quirks that are unique to you, we have a design narrative to fit every mood. When you invite an Obeetee carpet into your home, we want you to enjoy the energy and liveliness the floor furnishing brings to your home without worrying about the health of your loved ones and the impact of your purchase on the environment. 

For Obeetee’s handcrafted carpets, each knot represents thousands of hours of hard work. We ensure you get the highest quality rugs by controlling the production process from the second we start sorting through the yarn. All threads woven into carpets are processed in-house at our warehouses, where we dye the yarn into bespoke colours. Controlling this process allows us to produce carpet designs ranging from traditional to contemporary, while also ensuring we implement the best practices in the industry. 

Traditionally, dyes from natural products such as plants produce a fixed range of colours, limiting rug designs to natural colour palettes including indigo and shades of rust, ranging from red to beige and brown. These limitations, however, have never constrained creativity in rug design and instead facilitated the development of traditional colour palettes and motifs for centuries. For instance, our Mamluk Hand-Knotted Woollen Rug draws inspiration from traditional Persian rug designs, where frame-in-frame designs are embellished with opulent motifs. For this modern piece, hues of turquoise and rust are used to create intricately detailed and contrasting motifs that create the illusion of colours that would have been more difficult to achieve with natural dyes. 

Although the Mamluk rug is a modern take on a traditional rug design, the beauty of working with natural dyes stems from the challenge of ensuring a consistent colour match across each thread. Nevertheless, even when we work with newer dyeing techniques, we aim to maintain the integrity of sustainable rug-making practices. As leaders in the carpet industry, we employ a state-of-the-art Effluent Water Treatment System that allows us to treat the water we use in carpet production, ensuring it is safe to return to the environment, while also allowing us to reuse the energy expended in heating the water within the dyeing cycle. 

Modern advancements in dyeing techniques and technologies allow us to synthesise colours across the spectrum, ensuring we get the perfect shade, no matter how subtle the nuances of the colour are. These techniques allow us to explore a range of styles and designs, resulting in the multi-faceted collections you see today. From our contemporary collection, the Kurushul Hand Tufted Woollen Rug is a great example of the bright, multi-coloured designs that our modern dyeing processes allow us to achieve. A jumble of geometric shapes fitted across the surface of this rug, the contrast of shapes in this design is accented by the juxtaposition of shades of ochre, purple, blue, black, brown and beige. Although we enjoy the beauty of traditional designs, breaking out of the mould and letting colour inspire design always creates a lasting impression.

If you’re interested in supporting sustainable rug-making practices for a better future, you’ve come to the right place. At Obeetee, we firmly believe in producing beautiful carpets without compromising quality, and ensuring that we take care of the environment. If you’re interested in exploring home decor without guilt about your impact on the environment, you can find out more about our collections of handmade carpets online at obeetee.in. With a myriad of styles and designs available, we recommend that you explore our carpets in-store at any of our flagship locations pan-India to find the right fit for your home.