Let's meet our favourite brands... Today : Pappelina Rugs crafted with love and pride in Sweden

Posted by Sonia Greig


At Lemongrass & Aubergine, we are in love with those Pappelina rugs, for their design, the choice of colours, and of course - our motto- their quality. 

I bought my first Pappelina rug 10 years ago, in France, and today, this Vera orange rug still have the same shape and colour, from the time I bought it. And above all, the rug's maintenance is hassle free. What else can you ask ?

We started to import them for the shop 8 years ago and proof that it was the good choice, our customers are coming back to buy one or more rugs. It's the goal that every company should try to tend to and be proud of.

Pappelina rugs - Model Molly 

Lina Richardson, the founder of Pappelina, started the company as a weaver of paper, then cotton and linen, and then, seventeen years ago, moved to plastic to make Pappelina, the leader in the design and production of plastic rugs. The quality and environmental requirements are ensuring no hazardous metals nor harmful softeners are used in any part of the production process: 90 % plastic foil ribbon is from Sweden and 10 % warp thread is made in Germany.

Nowadays, Pappelina employs around 30 people, and all the rugs are made by hand with passion and proudness.

Pappelina rug - Model Viggo

How to make the rugs...

The plastic arrives in the factory in rolls and those are placed into a room to be kept at an ambient temperature for several days, making the plastic more malleable and easy to work with. Then, the rolls are placed onto a simple spinning machine that turns the ribbon onto a bobbin ready to be weaved.

The bobbin shoots from left to right and back, capturing the downward plastic threads weaving the jacquard way, into the color and pattern punched into the card in the machine. The process does take time and to create one row of the circle style shapes you see at the bottom of the picture on the screen takes just over a minute...so 10 rows would take 10 minutes plus of course the spaces in between. So it will take some time to produce just one rug, let alone hundreds.

From the loom, the long rug roll is then taken to the cutting room to become many shorter and more manageable rugs. The rug end is first lined up by hand on a long flat table to be sealed and flattened by a frequency welding machine which melts the end together in a very smart way, so it doesn't come undone. Then, every single rug, no matter how short, long, wide or thin, is cut to the chosen length using just a hand held pair of strong sharp scissors which requires skill and attention.

Once cut, the rug is folded in a special way, to avoid creasing, and taken to the final step - the Quality Room - to be tested by a team, every centimeters of it, on both sides, to ensure that the rug is ready to be ship to its new home. This attention to detail is what makes the rugs so "perfect' and show the love and passion of the whole Pappelina team, no matter the size, the color or the design of the rug.


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