Trending now
INSPIRED BY | MASTERS & MUSES | WORLD OF CABANA
When Märta Måås-Fjetterström died, she left behind hundreds of designs waiting to be woven. More than 80 years later, the drawers in the Swedish textile designer's studio overlooking the sea at Båstad continue to yield new rugs from female weavers, many of them emerging from sketches she never saw realised. Emma Becque explores her extraordinary life and legacy.
BY EMMA BECQUE | MASTERS & MUSES | 25 JULY 2026
Towards the end of 1940, Märta Måås-Fjetterström wrote a letter to her friend and collaborator Carl Malmsten. It read: "The road is long and instead of decreasing, the projects and sketches in my drawer accumulate, as if waiting to be realised. Before you can finish, life is over. I wish I could continue on another planet."
Within a year, the Swedish textile designer unexpectedly passed away. Left on the worktable of her studio in Båstad was the design for an unfinished antependium bearing the words "Be of good cheer", while nearby the drawers that had occupied her thoughts remained filled with watercolors, technical drawings and unrealised ideas.
It is difficult not to begin there, because those drawers still shape the story of Märta Måås-Fjetterström. More than eight decades after her death, designs continue to emerge from them, then are carried across the studio to waiting looms, where they are translated into wool by a new generation of female weavers.
Although she is often remembered as one of Sweden's most important textile artists, the most radical thing Märta created was arguably not a rug at all. It was a workshop.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Swedish handicrafts found themselves caught between preservation and progress. Historic textiles were being catalogued, collected and copied with admirable diligence, yet Märta became increasingly convinced that the craft's survival depended upon something more ambitious.
In 1905, she wrote that craft could only be secured through "sales and fair payment for work", a strikingly modern belief for somebody working within the Arts and Crafts tradition. Rather than preserving weaving, she wanted it to evolve.
A collaborative effort by female artisans who created a tapestry of horses for the Crown Princess of Norway, first shown at the Gothenburg Tercentennial Jubilee in 1923.
That conviction eventually cost her a position at Malmö County Handicraft Association, where disagreements arose over whether historic patterns should be repeated or reimagined. Her dismissal in 1911 proved decisive. Freed from institutional expectations, Märta began developing a visual language that belonged entirely to her own time, drawing from folk traditions, certainly, but refusing to be constrained by them.
The landscapes that informed this new vocabulary were those she knew best. Born in Östergötland in 1873, she grew up in a vicarage surrounded by gardens, waterways, forests and cultivated land. Letters reveal her delight in deep pine forests and woodland paths, while recurring motifs throughout her work suggest a lifelong fascination with horses, ancient trees and the shifting character of the Swedish landscape.
Looking through the archive, it's clear nature was rarely far away. A line of trees appears as structure before revealing itself as woodland, while flowering borders unfold through geometry, and water is reduced to color with subtle movement conveyed through gradients.
Among the earliest expressions of this sensibility was Hjorthagen, the knotted-pile rug exhibited in 1914, in which deer move across the surface, resembling creatures encountered in folklore. The work attracted the attention of Ludvig Nobel, who not only purchased the rug but later encouraged Märta to establish herself in Båstad. Without that encounter, the studio overlooking the Kattegat may never have existed.
When she purchased Strandgården beside the harbour in 1919 and established her own atelier, Märta was building far more than a place to produce textiles. The workshop became an experiment in how craftsmanship might survive the twentieth century. Skilled women were trained, employed and paid. Apprentices learnt alongside experienced weavers. Designs moved from sketchbooks to looms through a process that depended on interpretation and swerved replication.
Märta often compared weaving to music, describing herself as the composer, the weavers as the musicians and those who lived with the finished rugs as the listeners. A watercolor left on her desk marked the beginning of a design rather than its conclusion. Colors that appeared straightforward on paper might require weeks of adjustment before settling into wool, while compositions gradually evolved through countless decisions made at the loom. What emerged from the workshop was never a straightforward reproduction of the original sketch, but an interpretation shaped by the material, technique, and the accumulated knowledge of the women who brought it into being.
Their presence survives in a detail easily overlooked - every weaver who joins the studio selects a yarn color that belongs to her alone, and within each completed rug, a small knot woven in that shade serves as a discreet signature. Seen individually, these marks are almost invisible. Taken together, they form a parallel history of the atelier itself, recording the women who spent months, and sometimes years, translating drawings into textiles.
Success brought its own frustrations, however. Letters from the 1920s reveal a woman increasingly consumed by the practical demands of running a business. "No time for new designs," she complained at one point, frustrated by the administrative responsibilities accompanying success. The irony is difficult to miss; having built precisely the kind of thriving workshop she believed necessary for craft to survive, she found herself struggling to carve out time for the work itself.
When Märta died on Easter Sunday in 1941, she left behind almost 700 designs, many still waiting to be woven. More than 80 years later, watercolors still emerge from those same drawers before being carried across the studio to waiting looms, where colours are matched against yarn samples accumulated through generations and landscapes first observed decades ago are translated once again into wool.
Märta (1873-1941), in her studio in 1919. Image courtesy of Märta Måås-Fjetterström AB.
Read Latest Articles
