Cut, Not Printed

There are two ways to put a figure on a rug. You can colour it, or you can carve it. The first is a drawing. The second is a piece of relief sculpture that happens to be underfoot.

The wave that runs through the Serein is cut into the pile. Nothing about it is printed. What you see is not pigment but height: the pile is trimmed to two levels, and the boundary between them catches light on one side and holds shadow on the other. Walk around the room and the wave moves with you.

What hand-tufting actually is

Yarn is pushed through a stretched backing cloth with a hand-held tool, loop by loop, following a drawing transferred onto the cloth. The back is then coated and a second backing of jute and cotton is laid over it. Only after that does the carving begin, with shears, by eye.

It is slower than weaving by machine and it is not perfectly repeatable. Two rugs from the same drawing are not identical, and the edge of a carved line is never mathematically straight. That is the point of the method rather than a shortcoming of it.

A printed pattern fades. A carved one only changes with the light.

Two heights, one field

The same idea can be pushed further. In the Rylan Noble the field is worked at two pile heights across the whole surface, so the marks read as patina rather than as a motif. From a chair it looks almost plain. From standing it has a topography.

This is what makes a large rug bearable in a large room. A motif at that scale becomes a rug you are looking at. A relief at that scale stays a floor.

Why it takes two weeks

Nothing sits in a warehouse waiting to be discounted. A piece is made, finished, bound and sent, and that takes about two weeks from your order to your door. We would rather publish that number than promise a next-day delivery we would have to buy stock to keep.