Happy Holidays!

Wishing everyone a happy holiday, and a prosperous and peaceful 2012. From The Creative Matters Team - Carol, Donna, Abbey, Ange, Ana, Elizabeth, Erin, Jane, Julie, Leah, Maddy, Tiffany.

(photos from the children at Hamro Ghar - Goodweave Home for rescued children, after "Art Day")

Art Day Excitement!

As the year closes we are getting ready for the holidays and preparing for the Domotex exhibition in Germany in January 2012. The new "Art Day" collection is well under way in Kathmandu.

(103 - Graffiti on the loom)

(123 - Platinum on the loom and almost completed)

(13 - Platinum on the loom)

We are excited about the new line, a preview was seen in New York in September to great enthusiasm. We look forward to seeing some of the rugs in larger format.

We wish everyone a healthy and prosperous 2012.

Cover Modern Carpets & Textiles For Interiors Winter 2011

We were delighted to be featured in COVER Magazine "Creative thinking" (Winter 2011). Katie Loux really caught the spirit of Creative Matters in the article - the excitement of our team, our passion for textiles and specifically rug design.

Donna and I have been building Creative Matters for almost 25 years now, and it's wonderful to get this recognition in one of our very favourite magazines.

Creative Matters is happy to donate a rug for a silent auction on behalf of Vitanova

The Vitanova Foundation is a Woodbridge-based, non-profit corporation chartered by the Province of Ontario and a registered Canadian charity that provides a range of addiction-related services to individuals, families, and the community at large, all at no charge---services that include education, prevention, assessment, treatment, rehabilitation, shelter and aftercare.

For the past 23 years "Friends of Vitanova" have organized a special event and silent auction to help raise money for their Foundation. The 24th Annual Event is being held on Sunday November 27, 2011 at Da Vinci Banquet Hall (5732 Hwy. #7 Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada). Reception & Antipasto Bar 4:00pm and Dinner 5:00pm (Cash Bar). This celebration requires a reservation to attend, to purchase tickets please visit the Vitanova Foundation (Tickets: Adults $100.00, Children (12 & under) $40.00).

(photo of our donated carpet)

We chose this charity as we like to support our local community as well as our international ones (as we do through our partnerships with GoodWeave and Label Step in Nepal and India). In all cases we understand the need to help families through difficult times.

The rug we have donated is 4' x 6' handknotted custom one-of-a- kind carpet. For this we specified wool and viscose, and had it made in India. The viscose pattern shimmers like silk and was inspired by curvilinear metal railings with a playful chain link border. The sheen of the viscose offers a sparkling element next to the richness of the wool.

Don't miss this opportunity to support a great cause, enjoy the "Friends of Vitanova" event on November 27th and bid on some wonderful donations.

Textile Museum of Canada Fundraising - ReDesign 2011

(The CMI team with the winning bidder of our chair)

What a great night! The Gladstone Hotel was packed with makers, designers, and supporters of the textile museum. We were delighted to be involved with our chair "From the Ground Up". When we got our chair from the textile museum, it's simplicity and unusual orange red/black combination had us start where we always do - from the ground up. We designed a custom carpet with gradation of black through to the orange/red tone and finished the rug with a single "button" a raised puff of wool. The chair has been painted so the legs blend into the carpet for one seamless entity.

(Our finished chair photo Credit: Jill Kitchener)

The silent auction had the room filled with people hovering near their favourite chairs (we were delighted that a number of people bid on ours!) and by 8:45 the bell rang and the chairs all found new homes. Here is the link to see some of the photos of other chairs that had been redesigned - from cutting up the chair into pieces and stringing it on the wall like a necklace to romantic writing embroidered on the seat ("I will always love you") and lovely crocheted fabric attached to the back of the chair.

(Abbey with the chair she won, "Sketch for Quilt Number Seven" by Grant Heaps)

(Maddy with the chair she won, "The Component Parts of a Lazy Chair" by Georgia Dickie)

It was a great triumph. We were delighted to be invited and wish the Textile Museum of Canada ongoing success.

Another tradeshow this month, this time it's Toronto's IIDEX

We took part in the 2011 IIDEX/NEOCON tradeshow in Toronto this year. Our focus was on the custom design aspect of our business and also taking the opportunity to educate our visitors on the hand making process of carpets. We are happy to announce the show was a success! We mingled with a lot of incredible people and are very proud of our lovely booth.

A little tour of our booth - We had two large flatscreen tvs displaying a lengthy slideshow of the many custom rugs we've produced over the years. In front of our booth you can see our lovely ottoman covered in CMI samples.

The inside walls tell the story of how our rugs are made, from the dying of the yarns to the hand-weaving or hand-tufting process. We created large "unfinished" samples to hang on our walls, they were a big hit! Some of our visitors liked them so much they wanted to buy them.

We also had some tools on display used by the weavers in India and Nepal, Carol and Donna brought them back from their last trip in August.

And of course we had many drawers filled with beautiful samples to show off to our visitors.

September has been a busy but very rewarding month with the participation in the New York International Carpet Show and IIDEX. We were delighted by the feedback we received from both shows and are looking forward to DOMOTEX 2012 in a couple of months.

Our first time at the New York International Carpet Show!

This september we participated at the New York International Carpet Show for the first time and it was a great success. Our new "Art Day" line was received very enthusiastically from our established retailers as well as new retailers. Our customers loved the description of the design process we took with the art day line and the carpets that have been produced are exceptional (Every 6 weeks at CMI we close the office for a few hours and we all create art, the design team, the book keeper and the receptionist too! The art day line is a culmination of all the efforts, reinterpreted by the design team into our newest collection).

We have exhibited two types of carpet - the hand knotted cut pile wool and silk, and the flat woven kilim's in wool and metallic yarn.

Art Day with the Kids in Kathmandu, Nepal!

Every year Creative Matters hosts an art day with the children at Hamro Ghar in Nepal. These children have been rescued from the weaving looms in Nepal, a part of GoodWeave's initiative to end child labour and offer education. CMI has supported GoodWeave for a number of years but we also like to give directly to those children who have been taken advantage of. We do what we know well, support through creativity.

Once again, as every year, the children are enthusiastic hard workers who show tremendous creativity and artistry.

We began with life drawing, children painting each other in active poses including Krishna!

Then we moved on to a lesson on colour mixing as many had never used paint before. Then they painted large paintings of their favourite animals and their favourite holiday.

An obvious favoured holiday is the upcoming one "Dashain", where huge bamboo swings are built for the children to play on... the paintings caught the excitement of that holiday. As for animals...giraffes, tigers, elephants, peacocks, cats and birds.

We love to support GoodWeave, they are doing good work in Nepal by saving children from labour, giving them an education and generally improving the lives of the weavers. Donna and I were delighted to have the opportunity once again to spend time with these wonderful children. We thank the staff at Hamro Ghar who were so supportive.

- Carol Sebert

Hot and beautiful India!!!

Donna and I have enjoyed our time in India, as always. The colours, the people, the food, the hustle and bustle... all wonderful. To see our carpets in production we drive about an hour from Varanasi, one of the holiest cities in India where the Ganges flows and many take their morning prayers. We drive past rice paddies where women are tending the fields - such a beautiful image - their colourful sarees in a field of lush green, to a small village who's name translates to "where important people live".

Our rugs all look amazing, the custom hand tufted pieces and the brand new kilims which we will be unveiling in New York in a few weeks, as a portion of our "art day" line.

Next stop Kathmandu!

- Carol Sebert

A New Year, A New Collection!

It seems like it was just last week that the CMI team stepped off the plane from Hannover where they presented our newest collection Terra, and we’re already immersed in developing another new line of hand-knotted carpets for a new collection. Our team is ever expanding and this year we decided to take a fresh approach to creating a collection by creating 2 series’ of hand-painted and hand-drawn markings as inspiration for our new pieces.



In a field where we can easily utilize the computer and Wacom tablet as our tool of choice, we made the decision to “return to our roots” so to speak, and pick up a paintbrush. We chose to flex our artistic muscles with a series of “art days” where the entire team (office managers and accountant included) participated in intensive 3-hour sessions of painting, drawing and general mark making. And the results were fabulous!



We worked with different grounds like mulberry paper (wet and dry), watercolour paper and news print and covered them in India ink, charcoal,wax and paint. It was messy and brilliant and resulted in over 230 paintings and drawings. From there we collectively created 168 working concepts and were able to whittle these down to a collection of 7.



Now we’re on to the sampling process and with eager anticipation await their arrival! Creative Matters hopes to launch our still unnamed collection at the New York International Carpet Show and then at Domotex 2012. Times are changing and interesting things are happening at our little studio on Annette Street. Stay tuned!

We're Back!!

Carol, Donna, Ange and Abbey are back in the office and thrilled to have completed a 5th successful year at Domotex in Hannover, Germany. We launched our new Terra Collection at the show, which ran from January 15 – 18, to much enthusiasm from new and returning customers. The Terra Collection, with designs originating from the heirlooms of the Earth, speaks of inspirations from ice flows to mountain peaks, aspirations and nomadic encounters. The mood of each new rug engages in the vestiges that surround us, in their pure, simplistic forms.



Wish speaks to celestial motifs, along with microscope elements with the lightest colour of silk sparkling on the wool background. Bang is a delicate burst of fine silk rays that create a mesmerizing asymmetrical pattern. Offering a combination of high and low, silk and wool piles, Nomadic Glam is a dramatic glamorous take on a tribal-style design.



Filament shows a delicate interweave that will suit contemporary and more traditional spaces and Reflection is a contemplative variation on a stripe motif. Damask offers a non-traditional take on the ever classic design style.



As always, our Aerial Collection was also well received by all with faithful favourites still catching the eyes of passers-by. The sophisticated combination of lush Chinese silk and intricate design of such classics as Scratch, French Wire, Nova and Rory continue to attract our customer both local and abroad.

Germany is always such an inspiring show for the Creative Matters team and seems to renew us with new energy to create. As we work our way through the sometimes-dreary month of February, we find ourselves churning with new ideas for Domotex 2012. Over the next few months the team will be working through a series of creative workshops to cultivate new ideas and artworks to translate into our beautiful hand-knotted rugs.

Talk soon!