• Shopping and trying to bargain at The Grand Bazaar

• Video clips from my travels around the city

• Handwoven and hand-knotted Silk, Sumac and Kilim rugs filled the shop – Bazaar 55

• Embroidered boots, bags and fabric displayed at The Grand Bazaar
  

• Intricately patterned tiles at Topkapi Palace

• A beautiful green, blue and yellow color combination
  

• Blush toned foral designs adorned a ceiling in the Palace
  

• One of my favorite finds – a Sumac rug -  Here you see the involved craftsmanship from the backside
  

I gathered as much inspiration as I possibly could throughout my week spent in the city. I’ve had thorough training in creating tufted designs, and I’m ready to start applying all these new insights by translating them into my own unique rug collections!

Working with Farzin on the tufted software

I’d highly recommend a trip to Istanbul (preferably in the summer – as it snowed the first day I arrived and was bitter cold)!  Check out this NY Times article on 36 Hours in Istanbul to get all the highlights.

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!

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.