The ‘chaos’ of leftover yarn, spun into a circular rug

Lithuanian design brand EMKO has released the Chaos Rug, which repurposes textile offcuts

Spotted: The Chaos rug, which was designed by the design brand EMKO, along with the help of a local textile factory, is a spotted, rainbow rug made of leftover textile yarns. The concept was inspired after the creative director of EMKO, Audrone Drungilaite, visited the factory and found that years worth of offcuts unsuitable for mass production had been kept and stored, and were ready to be used.

Drungilaite says that the recycling of the offcuts “is quite expensive and, unlike wool, small pieces of linen tend not to spin into a high-quality new yarn”. The chaos rug is a profitable and eco-friendly solution to this, which plays on its industrial past to create a unique design and to draw attention to its circularity.

Across a brown or navy base, the multi-coloured linen offcuts are dotted around in different colours and heights, in an attempt to “bring some chaos into sterile modern interiors, while allowing the weaver a degree of improvisation,” said Drungilaite. Thus, each rug is unique and somewhat designed by the weaver themselves.

EMKO hopes that putting the industrial offcuts at the forefront of the design will inspire conversations about waste and the need to create circular solutions. Moreover, the rugs are hand-crafted in the same family-run textile factory that produced the offcuts in the first place, in the town of Panevėžys, encouraging an appreciation of local industry.

The rug has been shortlisted for this year’s homeware design Dezeen Award.

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