Don’t Even Think About Stepping on These Awesome Carpets. Look Closer.

A design trio from the Netherlands call themselves We Make Carpets, so it’s pretty easy to guess what they make. Yes. It’s carpets. Of course, their definition of “carpet” is a little loose, and these creations are not something you’ll be putting in your home, or even something you’ll want to walk across.

The team, composed of Marcia Nolte, Stijn van der Vleuten and Bob Waardenburg, create carpets out of everyday materials, all meticulously arranged into traditional carpet patterns. Most of the materials they use are even disposable. Using plastic utensils, cocktail umbrellas, matches, staples and pretty much anything else, they construct careful rectangular shapes, and use the objects’ positioning and color to create patterns.

The carpets are not fixed or fastened in any way, which has led to some mishaps, like the time a visitor took a nibble of the candy bar carpet. They can range in size from very small, maybe the size of a playing card, to something large enough to span a room. And they’re incredibly labor-intensive. Each carpet is both vertically and horizontally symmetrical, and each piece is laid by hand. Typically, construction begins in the center and works outward.

So why create carpets? For the team, it’s about appreciating the form of the objects that make up the carpet, and using them in a new and unexpected way that will allow others to appreciate their forms as well. The team is having a retrospective in Eindhoven to celebrate five years of obsessive carpet creation.