Inspiration for our first exclusive Merida Home area rugs

Hi. I’m Maegan, the Creative Director for Merida Meridian and Merida Home. Part of my job entails staying on top of the current design and fashion trends and using them to inspire new and innovative products for our company. Today I am thrilled to bring you my inspiration for our upcoming exclusive Merida Home product line: Ombre – Tufted Wool Area Rugs.

Ombre is a color shading effect from light to dark. While traveling around Paris last 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

The beauty of creating an Ombre wool area 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 represents much more of a color story than a surface pattern story.

Admiring the cast of purple across the city's skyline from Montmartre

I developed this concept as a tufted wool area rug pattern in our Fall River Massachusetts manufacturing facility where we have the machinery to easily mix yarn colors to create the ombre effect.  The fact that these rugs were prototyped and will be produced in Fall River by local craftsman is certainly part of the appeal for us and we hope for customers too. Besides being locally made in the USA, tufting here in Massachusetts gives us great flexibility and short turn around times for making new rugs.

First Ombre rug to be created on our Fall River tufting machine

Above is the first prototype of an Ombre rug created in Fall River. As you can see from the photo, 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 were 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!

2 Ombre Wool Rug patterns and their inspiration boards

To develop the colors I went to a series of design color boards we developed for 2010. This was a matter of pulling out exciting color groups that we then programmed our tufting machine to use and create as Ombre area rugs. Above is one example.

7 Ombre Wool Rug Colors

The final collection is made up of 7 colors, each representing a hot color trend we’ve defined for 2010. These rugs will be available in late January beginning with our 5′x9′ size and the all sizes in February. We are starting with the 5′x9′ size because that’s what our machine is programmed for to create prototypes right now and we wanted to get the new products out for customers to get samples ASAP.

Finished Ombre Wool Rug

Look for the Ombre Tufted Wool Area Rugs only on MeridaHome.com in late January!