Rugs and Floors

I’ve had the tremendous pleasure of designing numerous floors and floor coverings. The rugs are hand tufted 3/8" New Zealand wool of the finest quality crafted in the family-owned (since 1981) environmentally responsible workshop of New River Artisans, Piney Creek, NC. The floors are hand painted using the best quality latex floor and deck paint.

Rugs

Camp Cascade, Linville, NC engaged me to design eight handmade area rugs and numerous paintings that were to unify the strong linear elements of paneling and the broadly curved shapes of handmade lighting fixtures and wooden furniture.  Continuing the architectural theme of natural forms, all rug designs are based on objects of nature found on daily walks:  leaves, stones, bark, twigs, lichen. 

Birchbark Rug:  Being a Minnesota girl, I love birchbark.  This piece of birchbark I had saved along with several fall leaves served as the basis for this rug.  The wall art is also mine.

X Rug:  On one of my mountain hikes I found an amazing quarzite rock with a bold white "x" and lovely little circular lichens with black spots.  I made the "x" red for this hearth rug.  The painting on the wall using burned canvas and burlap is mine, too.

Blue Quartzite Rug:  This rug is based on a rock found in my garden.  It also has an amazing "x" shape that I decided to make brilliant blue.  All colors were adjusted and amplified.  The rug manufacturer’s option of irregular edges allowed the natural rock shape to emerge.

Gold Leaf Rug:  This 4' x 12' rug was inspired by my astonished discovery while walking in the fall, of an enormous partially decayed leaf fallen from a native North Carolina mountain Fraser Magnolia tree.

Hearth Rug:  This rug was inspired by lichen on stone. It rests quite naturally on the stone floor next to a two story double sided stone fireplace.

Stair Runner Upper:  The runner begins with rock and lichen inspiration, moving down it becomes bark, leaves and ferns. When it hits the bottom step it merges nicely with the birchbark rug on the lower floor.

Stair Runner Bottom:  The lower part of the runner and the landing piece relate to the theme of the large birchbark rug displayed above on the lower floor.

Painted Floors

River: The old school I live and work in has a 100’ hallway that I have painted to look like the New River that runs through my community. Adding to the effect, I designed fabric (printed at Spoonflower.com) to look like river rocks and made cushions for the Bertoia chairs and, of course, an outfit for myself to blend in.

Beach: I painted my bedroom floor in a way that resembles an archeological dig on a beach with a giant sea turtle, shells and horseshoe crabs. I discovered the shapes in the old layers of concrete and paint.

Lakeside cabin: I was delighted to be invited to paint a plywood subfloor for an old lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota. We decided to make it look like the granite bedrock below the cabin’s foundations, the lake over which the cabin hovered with a few assorted feathers and rocks for illusional depth. The faux grout was a way to divert the eye from the plywood joints. The feeling of excavation and mystery harkens from the ancient Roman floor remains I’d viewed in Morocco .