While traveling around Paris earlier this year, I was drawn to the glowing shades of city’s horizon and landscapes of color.  The vibrant blues of the sky over Rue de Rivoli, and  the hazy purples radiating over the city from Montmartre, became my inspiration for designing the Ombre Collection.

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.