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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.