What if you spill a drink on your precious rug and it soaks in? How do you deal with it? How much of it will come off after cleaning?
To address such concerns, we conducted an experiment using a white Gabbeh by spilling red wine, cola, and coffee onto it to see how well it came out clean.
Here is the rug used in this experiment.
Soaking the Gabbeh in red wine, cola, and coffee
We will soak the Gabbeh in red wine, cola, and coffee.
red wine 
Cola 
coffee
Wool has the property of being resistant to water absorption, and because it has oil on its surface, water does not penetrate easily.Therefore, for this experiment, we used a paper cup to intentionally soak the Gabbeh in plenty of liquid, and then waited another three minutes before starting to wipe it off.
Since this was an experiment, I left it for 3 minutes, but even if you spill a drink, if you notice it right away and wipe it up with tissue, it won't soak in as much.
But what if a drink does soak into the rug?
First aid when a drink soaks into your rug
This time, we will introduce how to deal with spilled drinks that have soaked in. We will explain how to deal with coffee as an example.
① First, press firmly with a dry tissue to allow the tissue to absorb the moisture.
Continue this process until all the water is removed. There may still be some coffee stains left at this point, but that's okay.
If the water has seeped through to the back of the rug at this point, apply tissue to the back of the rug as well. Make sure to wipe off the water from the back thoroughly, otherwise marks will remain.
②Next, wipe it off by patting it with a tightly wrung wet towel.
This process is like transferring the coffee on the rug to a wet towel. By wetting it again, just like removing stains, you can remove the stain.
Continue removing the stain until it is no longer noticeable and wait for it to dry.
When wet, it may appear to have a slight stain, but once it dries it will no longer be noticeable.
③ Let it dry for about an hour
As it dries, the stain becomes less noticeable.
Even if you spill a drink on the rug and it soaks in, you can make it less noticeable by taking care of it before the coffee dries completely.
When the same procedure was applied to red wine and cola, the following results were obtained.
In the photo, the red wine stains seem to be the most noticeable, but don't worry, they're actually not as noticeable as you'd expect when you see them in person.
Have your rug professionally cleaned
If you are still concerned about stains, we recommend taking your rug to a professional rug cleaner.
I also tried cleaning the rug used in this experiment.
This is the rug that we just fixed. From the bottom left of the photo, we tested coffee, cola, and red wine, and as you can see from the photo, the red wine left a small mark.
The result of cleaning this
What do you think? It may be hard to see in the photo, but the stain is now almost invisible.
This temporary fix didn't completely remove the red wine stains, but I found that having it dry cleaned would make it look much better.
Of course, if you quickly wipe up the drink before it soaks through to the back, the wool's moisture-repellent properties will prevent the stain from becoming too severe, so this is a first aid measure for dealing with stains on rugs that you should know so that you can deal with the situation calmly.
This article explains how to remove stubborn stains and clean rugs.