I’m excited to announce my newest collection of floor coverings launching early 2010, the Sweater Collection! Inspired by my travels to Sweden and sheep shearing in New Zealand, I wanted to create a 100% wool floor covering that had the look and feel of a knitted sweater. I’ve always loved knitted constructions ever since I purchased a knitting machine to create chunky, wool scarves back in college! This drive to accessorize with chunky knits lead me to create sweaters for the floor.
Inspiration board displaying textures in knitted fashions
I wanted to translate knit construction into a durable, woven floor covering. So, I work with a felted, crimped wool and undyed yarns to create a unique texture and color for the woolly surface.
Pictures of unique knitted constructions and soft color palettes
The first samples I wove were on our handloom at Merida’s Fall River facility. From these original samples, the designs were translated to weave on our mechanical Dobby looms. The combination of the crimped yarn and honeycomb weave made the sweater construction come alive!
The two designs woven off our mechanical looms in Fall River
The rugs texture in both designs creates a cozy blanket of wool, warming the floor!
While traveling around Paris earlier this year, I was drawn to the glowing shades of city’s horizon and landscapes of color. The vibrant blues of the sky over Rue de Rivoli, and the hazy purples radiating over the city from Montmartre, became my inspiration for designing the Ombre Collection.
Outside the Louvre early evening in January
Ombre is a color shading effect from light to dark and I wanted to create a collection of rugs that reflected this gradation of color. The beauty of creating an ombre rug is that the effect does not overwhelm a room setting. Its design is a highlight of color that creates a mild stripe across the width of the rug. It plays much more of a color story than a surface pattern story.
Admiring the cast of purple across the city’s skyline from Montmartre
I planned to develop this concept as a tufted rug collection. The flexibility of our tufting machine in Fall River would allow for easy yarn/color mixing to help create the ombre effect. I pulled additional colors to round out the pallet from my Color Trend boards for 2010.
First Ombre rug to be created on our Fall River tufting machine
As you can see from the photo above, the pile is a bit shaggy when first tufted. I wanted to create a low profile rug, so I had the cut pile surface sheared very short and clean. This finishing process completed the look. Once the ends of the yarn we sheared, a stippled effect was revealed and each yarn end appeared as a single point of color, similar to pointillism. This effect and the gradation of color made the perfect ombre!
The first round of samples developed for Ombre – eventually introducing lighter shades
The final collection is made up of 8 colors (some of which are not picture here), each representing a color trend I’ve defined for 2010.
