Narrative Threads Blog
Scroll through our Narrative Threads blog to enjoy behind-the-scenes insight on special projects for leading interior designers and architects.
Scroll through our Narrative Threads blog to enjoy behind-the-scenes insight on special projects for leading interior designers and architects.
Since Creative Matters opened its doors 35 years ago, the vast majority of our floor coverings have been made from wool. This includes our custom projects for hotels, offices, retail spaces and homes, and our 14 rug collections. We sat down with Carol Sebert, Managing Partner and Founder of the firm, to discuss the reasons for this decision both historically and moving forward.
“So poetic.” “C’est superbe.” “Like a reset button.” These are just a small sample of the expressions of awe and wonder we received every day during Paris Design Week for our installation titled “Winter Garden”. Inspired by a Rumi quote, we developed the exhibit in collaboration with Parisian Design studio LOMA and presented it to the public in a small gallery in the Le Marais district of Paris.
The short answer to the question why Prince Charles met Carol Sebert is because we make floor and wallcoverings with Canadian wool. But of course there is a longer answer …
We are delighted to announce our first two all-Canadian rugs. By all-Canadian we mean rugs made with wool sourced from Canadian sheep growers where it is harvested safely and humanely by a skilled shearer. We mean wool that is spun at a family-owned mill in New Brunswick that has been operating since 1857. We mean designed in Toronto by a firm that has been creating rugs for over 30 years (that’s us). And we mean handtufted by a manufacturer with decades of experience in Waterloo, Ontario.
The wall art pictured in the image above is a wonderful example of the advances we have made in “soft wallcoverings” at Creative Matters. Not only was this evocative textile made using 100% undyed Canadian wool, it was also fabricated by our own design team in our Toronto studio.
January is usually a busy month for trade shows for those of us who create handknotted rugs with the Domotex show in Germany and Maison+Objet in France. This year however, we participated in our first virtual trade show - an innovative event organized by COVER, the world’s leading magazine for handmade carpets and textiles for interiors.
Welcome to the first in a series of interviews introducing the remarkably talented artisans around the world who turn Creative Matters designs into beautifully crafted floorcoverings. Today we meet a highly successful mill in the Bhadohi district of northern India.
October is wool month. This amazing fibre will be celebrated around the world for such a wide range of reasons. Has it occurred to you that among other things it is: natural, renewable, biodegradeable, insulating, breathable, resilient and elastic, multi-climatic and trans-seasonal, easy care, odour resistant and safe?
Like many of you, we were surprised and confused to suddenly find ourselves working from home in the middle of March. Our gorgeous new showroom abandoned; no access to our colour lab with its thousands of wool samples…
Welcome readers from around the world. We hope this issue of Narrative Threads finds you, your families and colleagues well. To show you how we’re managing, how our colleagues at mills in other parts of the world are faring, and what we can do together to keep our international community strong, we bring you this update.
Art Day - when our whole team takes time away from regular work to indulge in pure creation on a particular theme - is at the heart of the design culture of Creative Matters. Imagine everyone’s delight this month when Senior Designer Sandra Ciganic-McKinney announced that she had booked four Tibetan rug weavers complete with mini-looms to join us for our next Art Day.
We know how very important colour is to every project. All our designers have a trained and keen eye to see the relationship between colours and how they affect one another. Our studio is set up so the designers (and visiting clients) have ready access to the thousands of colours of yarn to help our clients achieve the look they are seeking.
As President of Creative Matters I am often asked to choose some highlights from the closing year. This time however, I find myself most excited by the major initiatives we took in 2019 to move our business into the new decade.
Following on the success of our two previous look books, we’re excited to announce that Inspired 3 is now available in hard copy (request one here) or for online viewing. Unlike the brochures for our collection rugs, each of our look books contains almost 200 images of original designs that can be used as a jumping off point for custom rug or wallcovering creations.
In 2018 we were delighted to participate in a project that required 97 handknotted rugs. Until this year, we have assigned handknotted rugs to our trusted fair trade suppliers in Nepal and India. In 2018 however, we had the good fortune to work with a slightly different style of handknotting and create an incredible opportunity for Afghan women.
In November we celebrated 30 years since our President Carol Sebert founded Creative Matters. To honour the occasion the whole team flew from Toronto to New York for three days staying at a big house in the country and taking the train into the city each morning.
As Creative Matters will celebrate its 30th anniversary in November, our management team took the opportunity to look back at our designs - and the process of designing - through the years.
Following the incredible success of our first look book, we are delighted to announce the arrival of our second, inspired 2. Unlike our collection books that feature floorcoverings that have been fully-designed and produced as handknotted rugs, our look books present a large collection of carpet and wallcovering designs at a much earlier stage in their development.
In recent years, technology has opened up new opportunities, so producing machine-made carpet without a repeat has become a liberating design choice - it changes what used to be a very rigid way of producing carpet into a format with endless possibilities.
Take a look through our portfolio and collections and you will quickly notice that the vast majority of our floorcoverings - from boardrooms to bedrooms - are made of wool. As visual people, our love affair with wool begins with its aesthetic properties, but for interiors professionals there are a host of practical reasons why wool is the ultimate fibre.
Last month, 28 interior design staff from Yabu Pushelberg visited the Creative Matters studio for an interactive day to share each company's parameters for floorcovering projects. Here are the six most asked questions about rug creation.