Klättermusen

Klättermusens Verkstad is the workshop and store of Swedish outdoor brand Klättermusen, a short walk from my studio. They wanted their mark tufted at two by two metres for the wall of the space.

The ground it sits on is an illustration I had already made: a circular botanical scene, seed heads and reeds standing against a low sun. It went into the previewer as an example of how a pattern might sit behind the mark, and it was the one they kept. Their lettering and the mouse at its sewing machine ended up drawn over it in Light Pink, with the sun carried through in Ochre Yellow.

Rather than send a flat mockup, I built them that previewer. It recolours artwork into real yarn, simulates how cut pile will render it, tallies the cones to order, and drops the result into a photograph of the wall it was headed for. The rest of the palette was settled by playing with it: Salmon, Aubergine Purple and Maple Brown.

We made it on their shop floor over the first week of August with Rose Hallgren, on the modular tufting frame she designed for Tufting Ex Machina, which opens to two by four metres and folds down into a sports bag. The tool exports a projection version of the design, contours only and no pile texture, which we threw onto the stretched cloth and traced by hand: in mirror, since a tufting gun punches from the back and every letter has to be drawn in reverse. Then 14 mm of cut pile, glued and trimmed.

Rose hand-stitched the backing, and a pocket along it to take a flat aluminium bar, giving a piece this size some rigidity and something to hang from. At around twenty kilos, the hanging became a design problem of its own. A curtain rod would have held it too far off the wall, so I drew a printed saddle for the bar to drop into instead: two screws, no rake, and the rug sitting 5.8 mm off the concrete. They went on the printer twice. The first mount left it very slightly askew, so a second set carries an offset to correct it.