Plastic rugs from the heart of Sweden
Pappelina, the Swedish maker of plastic rugs, was founded by designer Lina Rickardsson. In Dalarna, in the heart of Sweden, she works with Kim Fröyen's traditional weaving mill to produce high-quality plastic rugs for indoor and outdoor use. They are non-slip and also suitable for underfloor heating.
Lina came up with the idea of making plastic rugs through the weavers' guild in her home town of Falun in Sweden. Her passion for weaving led her to train in art and weaving in Gothenburg, Sweden. After graduating, Lina began making linen rugs and paper placemats and selling them in shops in Gothenburg, Stockholm and Malmö in Sweden. The products went down well, and Pappelina was born. The name is a play on words combining "papper", Swedish for paper, and the first name of the designer and founder.
When she realised she could no longer handle the orders by hand herself, she went looking for a weaving mill. This was no easy task, as weaving mills in Sweden are dying out, but she eventually found a small family business where she could set up her own loom.
At this mill in Dalarna, she happened upon a stock of colourful plastic strips that had been used to weave rugs in the 1950s. From them, Lina developed a new, modern version of the plastic runner, weaving in twice as much material as traditional runners to bring out the colours of the strips more strongly. The mill was sceptical at first, as production was fairly expensive – not least because it used twice the material. But Lina believed in her idea and first exhibited her rugs at the Formex design fair in Stockholm in 2001. The fair was a success, and Lina took 124 orders for plastic runners.
Today, Pappelina produces around 100,000 runners a year, employing 40 people at the old weaving mill in Dalarna. The rugs are shipped all over the world.
Production begins with an idea from Lina. She sends a pattern file to an expert, who calculates exactly when each warp thread needs to be raised or lowered to turn Lina's idea into a rug. These calculations produce a punch card that later controls the loom. Pappelina rugs are woven on almost 50 looms dating from the 1950s and 1960s. But before weaving can begin, 600-metre-long warp threads have to be wound onto the loom's warp beam. Each thread is then fed into the loom and the weights are set precisely so that the finished rug will be straight.
The high-quality plastic comes from the Swedish manufacturer Gislaved Folie, which meets European standards, so it is free from plasticisers and metals. The plastic is dyed, rolled, textured and cut in southern Sweden. Finally, at Kim Fröyen's weaving mill, it is heated and wound onto spools until it is ready for the loom.
"The plastic has to be spooled perfectly – not too tight and not too loose – because if anything goes wrong, the whole runner is ruined. Your eyes, your ears and above all experience are crucial here. A margin of error of a tenth of a millimetre can ruin the entire weave." Kim Fröyen
Every single centimetre of the finished rug is inspected before it is allowed to leave the mill.
