Kiikan Kutomo

Kiikan Kutomo - the weaving works at Kiikka, in south-west Finland - produced flatwoven rugs to designs by named Finnish textile artists, among them Laila Karttunen and Greta Skogster-Lehtinen, who is also represented in this collection. Pieces are generally dated to the 1920s and 1930s.
The rug-weaving workshop at Kiikka in those years was Aaltosen mattokutomo, founded in 1914 by the handicraft teacher Hilma Aaltonen and run by her family until 1970. It wove for private houses and for public buildings including the Finnish Parliament House and the Bank of Finland at Vaasa, and exported as far as South America; its designers were Karttunen, Skogster-Lehtinen, Toini Kallio and Impi Sotavalta. Whether every piece marked for Kiikka came from that workshop is not settled here, so the two are noted side by side rather than treated as one name.