The founder of the company said her carpets should be as music.
She was the composer,
and the weavers were the musicians
and you when you walk on the carpet you listen to the music.
In the Marta Maas studio we're doing useful art textiles.
Marta Maas she was an artist and she was so fascinated over the Oriental carpets that
she saw 100 years ago.
We are still producing her carpets and we have more than almost 1,000 different designs.
It's an honor to get to know her through her work, her design, her sketches.
When we have a client put an order of a special carpet here, the weavers start lining up the
threads for the warp.
The warp is the backbone, it's the spine of the carpet.
It should bear the carpet all its life.
That's almost always flax or linen.
And we are winding them up going round and round and it's really important so that all
threads are exactly the same length.
And we are taking them down from the spinning wheel.
And then you invite your colleagues to come to a bomnings party.
It's when you set the warp in the loom.
We thread them through steel eyes.
So it's going to be really tight and it's going to be really even.
We are many and we are talking and laughing and we know it's a start for a new project
so it's really a good day when we are doing bomning.
We have about 8 tons of yarn in 1600 - 1700 different colors.
And if we're missing something we need to dye it and then we have white wool coming
from Sweden or Norway and it needs to be really strong and good wool and not the sweater wool,
not soft and nice.
We use the synthetic, reactive colors.
We have three pigment colors: red and blue and yellow.
And all these three colors you do everything with.
If you're really used to working with colors you can see maybe twice or three times as
much as normal people.
Marta Maas Fjetterstrom lived her last 22 years on the coastline here in Bastad.
But she grew up where there were a lot of trees and flowers.
Carpet was not common in Sweden, before that we had sand and plants on the floor that we
were forming in nice patterns so it's really the nature that has got inspiration to the
different carpets.
What artists are not inspired by nature?
What human being is not inspired by nature?
We get all the yarns ready and we wind it up into small balls in the right combinations
of colors and threads.
We always prepare that before we start doing the flat weave carpet, it's called rollakan
in Swedish.
Different techniques can give you different solutions but in the rollakan the wool is
going between the warp.
It's really strong and it's reversible, so it's a really old technique in the very cold countries.
You have different kinds of working instructions for different carpets and it's built up by
small squares.
It's really important for us to pass on the knowledge from generation to generation and
we do that by sitting two and two in the looms.
It might take a year to do a carpet so you sit beside the same weaver day out and day in
and of course you know everything about each other so you could rest together with
the other person.
It's like walking in silence, you can work in silence beside each other.
Eventually when you are finished with your carpet now is the cutting down and you're
allowed to see the whole carpet because you have stored it during the process of weaving.
It's like waiting for a baby coming, you know that it is there, you feel it, you can see it
you have been through everything but you don't know exactly what will come out.
And after that the carpet need to rest and we do some flattening.
We just nail it to the floor and putting just a little bit of water, and then we put wooden
plates on.
So it's going to stay there for 4 or 5 days and then it's ready to be rolled
and packed and then shipped to the owner.
I've been talking to so many clients and they could see their whole life in the carpet.
They could see their children growing up, the parties, the divorces, the quarrels the
happiness the sadness so it's focusing the whole lifetime to one room, to one spot,
to one carpet.
It's really a joy and a pleasure to make something that lasts.