Play carpet

Children can make a toy out of almost any object. Often all it takes is a little impulse, and the wooden cheese box becomes a car, the shoebox the garage, and off they go - on the floor, of course. Playing on a carpet with a pre-painted road network is twice as good. Especially since it not only protects the floor from the cold, but also the floor itself (sometimes the ears of the occupants under the nursery) and brings color into the room. And since there may be an aesthetic one in addition to early musical education, we particularly like the few quiet, muted colors of this play rug. The simple landscape on it, inspired by the manufacturer's Finnish homeland, cuts a fine figure in both children's and living rooms, leaving enough room for play and imagination. The play rug is woven in a resource-friendly way from recycled cotton and - for more durability and thus longer life - a proportion of synthetic fibers. For its part, the dense, strong rep weave helps the rug take a lot of everything for a long time. The pattern is printed by hand, differences in color intensity are therefore possible.

Who hasn't heard of the colorful Finnish rag rug - but its inventor Eija Rasinmäki is less well known. Ever since she was given a loom by her mother, herself a weaver, at a young age, she has been enthusiastic about carpet weaving and later turned her passion into a profession. From the very beginning, back in 1970, she used recycled cotton or wove from remnants - long before the term upcycling was coined. Together with her husband, she founded Finarte in 1985 to offer affordable yet high-quality rugs produced in a resource-conserving way. While she initially designed all of her rugs herself, she now works with a range of different designers. The common thread in her designs is the combination of traditional Finnish weaving craftsmanship with modern Finnish design.

Since the 1990s, Finarte has had its carpets manufactured in India, a conscious decision for the production location: where the cotton is grown, processed and upcycled, it should also be woven. The company obtains selvedge remnants, production overhangs and offcuts from the textile industry, recycles them and then weaves them into carpets. This saves around 11,000 liters of water per kilogram of recycled cotton - the amount that would be needed to produce one kilogram of fresh cotton. In upcycling, a wide variety of cotton scraps, mostly from the clothing industry, are shredded into fibers and spun into new yarn. In addition to recycled and upcycled cotton, Finarte uses other natural materials such as virgin wool, jute and leather scraps, and since 2018 has also been producing carpets from PET material obtained from recycled plastic bottles.