Warp & Weft adds winning student designs to line

Alex Lemonde-Gray -- Home Textiles Today, 6/4/2012 8:36:58 AM

New York - Rug source Warp & Weft showed the two winning entries from its Contemporary Creations design competition at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair.
The design competition was open to upper division textile/surface design program students at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The competition was meant to be the students' first assignment in Custom Rug and Carpet Design class, taught by adjunct professor Deborah Hernandez, for the Fall 2011 semester. Warp & Weft promised to produce the winning design.
A jury of design industry professionals and journalists selected the five competition winners from a group of 24 entries. The company decided to produce rug versions of the top two designs: Full Circle by Denize Sofia Maaloe and Kaleidoscope by Charlotte Rodiere.
Warp & Weft now features the two rugs in its Designers' Studio Collection.
Full Circle by Maaloe depicts a sun-print of sage creating a vintage feel. She used the Van Dyke Brown printing process to in producing the design. Full Circle was made into a 6x9 rug, hand-knotted in Nepal of hand-carded and hand-spun Himalayan wool for the dark-brown background and a blend of wool and Indian mulberry silk for the leaves. The wool and silk were tweeded in various proportions to create the effect of layering and translucency, according to the rug company. The rug also features an irregular edge along the design's border in pure white silk.
"I am, very excited to be working with Warp & Weft and to have my work shown at ICFF," Maaloe said. "My goal, as a designer, is to use textiles to express the ideas that I believe in deeply - sustainability, living ethically, etc. I wanted the design to evoke a feeling of peace and healing, I wanted it to be grounding and to be very tactile and textured. The imagery, the colors and the fibers all helped to realize this vision."

Kaleidoscope bears strong geometric shapes and kaleidoscope inspiration. A bold pattern of angular shapes and strong colors on a neutral ground adorn this 6x9 hand-tufted rug featuring colorful triangles made of semi-worsted Merino wool in tip-sheared texture, along with a shimmering white background made of a blend of wool and twisted silk in cut pile.
"With this challenge I had to think of my pattern in scale for the first time," Rodiere said. "It was a great exercise to see how a motif can come to life on a big surface like a rug. As part of the design process, we went to the Warp & Weft showroom to view their rugs and learn about the different processes used to make them. I was really drawn to the technique of using different pile heights to create pattern and texture. I loved the idea of making a pattern without drawing it, just by suggesting the shape with the length of the fibers."
"I am delighted to have been able to take part to the Warp & Weft competition and I'm also very proud to see my work exhibited at ICFF," she continued. "It's my first professional project and I am thrilled to see it happening in NYC."