Most wedding gifts don't survive the year. This one is wool, two by three feet, and built to outlive the marriage certificate.
Most wedding gifts do not survive the first year. The flowers go in the bin on Monday. The cake is gone by Sunday. The cards get put in a drawer that nobody opens again.
In June, David emailed us with a different kind of idea. He and his partner wanted a rug for their wedding day, something that would stand at the ceremony and then live in their home afterwards. The design was simple in concept and difficult in execution: a bright blue sky, soft clouds, and their new family name in yellow across the middle.
He had never commissioned a rug before, and he had questions. What material would it be made from? What method did we use? What is pile height, and how does it affect how sharp the image looks?
Fair questions, all of them. Here is what we told him.
We use 100 per cent wool. It is durable, soft underfoot, and it holds colour beautifully. For something that is going to be walked on for decades rather than hung on a wall, there is nothing better.
Every rug we make is hand tufted. The yarn is worked into a backing cloth using a tufting machine held by hand, then secured with a latex backing and finished by hand around the edges. It is slower than printing and slower than weaving, but it is the only method that gives us full control over shape, colour and texture in the same piece.
Pile height is how far the yarn stands above the surface of the rug. We work at around 10mm for cut pile, which is the sweet spot between plush comfort and visual clarity. Go higher and it gets fluffier but softer in definition. Go lower and it sharpens up but loses some of the feel.
Once we started tufting, we hit a problem. The lettering was small, and in cut pile the edges were going soft. Legible, but not sharp.
So we emailed David and offered to redo the letters in loop pile instead, at no extra cost. Loop pile sits slightly lower than the surrounding cut pile, which gives a much cleaner, more defined edge. The result is text you can read clearly from across a room, sitting inside a surface that is still plush everywhere else.
We could have finished it as originally agreed and nobody would have known. But we would have known.
Two feet by three feet. 100 per cent wool. Cut pile clouds, loop pile lettering, three tones of cream inside a single cloud so the shapes have depth rather than sitting flat.
It took eight weeks from the first email to their front door.
Every commission starts with a blank frame. No catalogue, no templates. You bring the artwork or the idea, we work out the colours, the construction and the pile, then we build it by hand.
Send us your idea and we will tell you honestly whether we can make it, and what it will take.
