Tania Johnson has reinterpreted the knotted method of carpet production with her photo-realistic rug designs. These exceptional rugs capture fleeting moments in time through photography and translate into timeless designs. Every rug starts with a moment that inspires Tania, commonly light, shadows and reflections, which is shown exceptionally through her ‘Ripple’ rug. Tania takes photos wherever she goes, whether it be an icy pavement on the morning school run, or a work trip to Nepal. Inspiration is found in the everyday environment that surrounds us.

As the contemporary rug market has grown hugely, clients see rugs as they would a piece of art. Tania designs every rug in her collection herself and each one is based on a photo that Tania has personally taken.

Tania’s inspiration is shown through her love of photography. Every photograph that Tania captures contains millions of shades of colour, which translates into her designs. Colours from every photograph are reduced to as few colours as possible when producing a design. These rugs are a challenge to produce, the design has to be intricately woven, while retaining the feel of the original inspiration.

Tania graduated from London’s Royal College of Art, with an MA in Woven Textiles, before designing for a number of high-end home furnishing companies in the US. As a designer for Calvin Klein Home for several years, Tania designed the brand’s first rug collection in 2002 which further developed her passion for innovative rug design. In May 2010 Tania launched her debut collection of hand knotted rugs in New York under her own label.

Designs are produced with a specific textile software. This software reduces the colours from Tania’s photos before creating rug graphs. With a background in weaving, Tania is technical in her approach. It is the challenge of creating a useable design while retaining the details of the original photo that she really enjoys.

All of Tania’s rugs are hand knotted in Nepal in a painstaking process. Tania’s rugs often involve 11 weavers working on one single rug, sat side-by-side. These rugs are delicately woven in Himalayan wool, which has a beautifully soft consistency and is also renowned for its strength and natural high-lanolin content. Using these fibres, alongside the use of Chinese silk, increases the lustre of these rugs.

Once the yarn is spun the fibres are then dyed in Nepal and left out in the sun to dry. Preparing the looms to produce one of these rugs can take an intense several days to set up alone. A graph that contains Tania’s design is then attached to the loom and woven.

Colour palettes are used in a variety dependant on the design. Tania prefers to keep the designs tonal, using many subtle shades of the same colour which attributes to the photo realism of the rugs.

All Tania’s designs use different numbers of colours and even the same design can vary depending on the colourway. The Tree Mist design, in the teal beige colour way, uses 18 shades of colour. There are 13 colour positions but as Tania is able to blend up to three shades of colour in each knot, some positions mix more than one colour, in differing proportions of wool and silk. This helps create the subtle gradation from one tone to the next. One single knot is produced from three fibres and contains up to three shades of one colour, alongside different mixtures of wool and silk, which allows for detailed gradation of both colour and texture.