#rug tufting

[emiliaoleary]

Hooking rugs that look like dogs

Here's how I do it:

The process I use is called rug hooking (not latch hook or punch needle or tufting, though it is the forerunner of the latter two techniques). Rugs are hooked by pulling loops of fabric strips or yarn through the holes of a base fabric with a coarse open weave, like burlap, or linen, or rug warp. The loops are pulled through the fabric with a squat-handled hook whose business end is shaped like a crochet hook.  There are no knots and the loops aren't sewed down in any way.  The whole thing stays put just by the tension of all those loops packed together in the weave of the foundation fabric.

This isn't a true detailed tutorial but a walk-through of my particular process. The same information is on my web page, emilyoleary.com .

I hook with yarn, rather than with cut strips of wool fabric, which is what many rug hookers use.  I can get a looser, more organic distribution of loops with yarn than I could with wool strips, which are hooked in neat lines. 

Mostly I use wool yarn. In terms of yarn weight, I can use DK, worsted, or Aran.  If I'm using thicker yarn, I leave more holes un-hooked; if I'm using finer yarn, I hook more densely or double up lengths of it.  I particularly like using single ply yarns (like Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride or Malabrigo Worsted).  I don't keep count, but I think I usually use around two dozen types and colors of yarn per dog.  

This is my yarn wall in my apartment. Mostly brown and gray yarn!

I start from a small drawing in my sketchbook, then I head to FedEx office to use a copy machine, blowing up the drawing repeatedly and experimenting with how big the dog rug should be. 

After transferring the image onto my linen, I immediately go over it with Sharpie, because the Saral is really difficult to see and really easy to rub off.

The rug is held taut by a PVC quilting frame that I set on my lap.

I push my hook down through the fabric with my right hand and my left hand stays below the fabric and guides the yarn while I pull it up and through with the hook. Not every hole in the fabric is hooked. Hooking every hole would make the rug too dense. I do hook pretty densely, though-- If you pick up one of my rugs you’ll see they have a slight curl to them, which is because they’re hooked pretty tight. I'm using all different weights and types of yarn, so it's a challenge to keep the overall tension even.

I hook my loops at varying heights to create a very low relief. Sometimes I trim the loops to make them fluffier or wispier or to shape a particular part. I look at a reference photo while I work and pull out and redo sections a lot.

My q-snap frame can accommodate the growing dog rug. I have extenders to make it bigger and I can clamp around my hooking.

The back of a rug looks like lines of little stitches. The lines are little worm trails snaking around because lines of hooking are not supposed to cross over each other. It's important to start a new length of yarn rather than cross over a stitch you already made! I read this when I first started and took it to heart. It makes it much easier to undo and redo hooking if you have to (and I redo sections A Lot). It also keeps the back from getting too bulky and resulting in uneven wear on the back of a functional rug that gets floor use.

When I’m done hooking everything I turn the rug over and brush watered-down Sobo glue on the edges of the dog, making sure to get one or two of the outermost lines of hooking. I do a couple coats of this thinned out glue. I'm careful not to use so much that it seeps to the front of the rug. When the glue is dry I cut the rug out, but I don't cut so close that the loops don't have any linen to keep them in.

​ It generally takes me at least several months to finish one dog rug. My hooking frame and yarn bag are very portable (though bulky) so I can hook out and about at coffee shops or the library or a brewery if there's enough space and light.

Hooking in the wild makes me an ambassador for making things in general and rug hooking in particular. I answer people's questions and always emphasize how relatively easy it is to get started hooking. Sometimes I get anxious that other people will hook rugs that look like mine but better, but I think that working in a traditional medium means you should share your knowledge for the good of the craft.

[revoltinglittleworm]

Acrylic on tufted rug

Mars Kneale

[turboemmy]

edgar!! ^_^

[sibyllemathilde]

Recent batch of pillows off to their new home 🍀

IG

[gummygunk]

イチゴ　マネキネコ

[clammyheart]

worked on this hand punch needle rug for so long 🥹 but y'all i LOVE how it turned out. this commissioner had a lot of trust in me changing the positioning/size of all the logos, and adding pastel ombre yarn stripes for that good good holographic CD effect! 💿

of course, i wish there were a way to get SUPER precise tiny letters, but with a hand punch needle and a chunky yarn, this was as small as i could get!

[funzos]

Blupee Tapestry 💎✨

30x30 tufted piece

insta ♡ ko-fi ♡ shop

[alicewisbeystudio]

http://alicewisbeystudio.etsy.com

Kuromi inspired tamagotchi mirror- hand tufted with chain detail and two charms (wooden and punch needle)

[nim-lock]

went rug tufting 👀👀 will get finished thing in mail at some point

[ehh-is-the-name]

You know when I said I'd make a Floory rug..?

So yeah, I did it.

This is your calling card to do the same. Make a rug, I triple-dog dare you. Don't know how?

Here's a breakdown of how I made The Floor:

Before fully getting into it, in that rb I said:

We could have so much mroe than what the shop offers- it could be glorious. I couldn't get tuft chin hair or flower power blush floor with $45 dollars at their store, but I could get it irl for the low low price of like a week-straight worth of work.

Ha... haha.... No. It took a lot longer than that. MUCH longer than that.

This is a little jitter lapse with the dates I worked on him. In each pic I spent around 2-3 hours working on him, except the last few in August. Those I spent like 3-5 hours on because I needed him to be finished before the semester started. My goal was to get him finished and sitting in my dorm, and I fucking did :)

= - - =

Starting from the top though, since I had the design after making the rb post linked, I decided on the size. I was watching the video showcasing him as a rug, and I gauged he was about a yard wide, so I based my measurements on that. I knew that I was going to needle punch him instead of latch hook him because I felt the punching would be faster. And well... I've done punch needling before this project so I figured it'd be faster than learning a new technique.

Here's what I mean, for a frame of reference.

Since I went the punching route, I knew he'd need a frame to be punched out on. To keep the fabric taut and all that jazz. Luckily for me I had a bunch of wood hanging around from an old bed's slots, so I made the frame out of that. Similarly, I had a bunch of fabric lying around.

Word of advice: DO NOT USE NORMAL FABRIC WITH A NORMAL PUNCH NEEDLE YOU WILL TEAR THAT SHIT UP. Learned that the hard way-

The fabric I used was NOWHERE near "loose" enough for a big punch needle. Loose in the sense that it has more holes in it. On the left is the fabric you're supposed to use when making a rug (Monk's Cloth), and on the right is the fabric I used (pic not of the exact cloth but close).

Notice that the holes on the right are a LOT smaller... I did not realise this mattered until I'd already primed the frame and drew him on with a sharpie.

Bask in his glory.

To give a breif on how I did this, I hooked my 'puter up to the TV with an HTMI, opened the image I had of him (it's a bit different than the of doodle in the rb b/c I wanted brighter colours), and literally held the wooden frame with the fabric on it up to my TV and traced it. I traced it from the inside first so that it would be mirrored on the side I would be punching on. If you draw the design you want to punch on the side you're punching on please mirror the image first.

Forgot to say, yes I had a staple gun too, so that didn't add into the price of making this Floory rug.

After this point, it was pretty smooth sailing, sorta... It would've been if I'd bought a thinner yarn for the main body. See, in this whole experiment, I was very dead set on keeping this project under $45 so I bought a large ball of cheap yarn. I tried to gauge how much I would need with the needle height (about 3/4 inch I used), but I got scared and just wound up buying this giant green ball that I needed to de-ply to work with properly. You could kinda see it in the jitter-lapse below, but yeah.

Before punching with this Red Heart size 4 yarn, I had to separate 1 of the ply FOR THE ENTIRE RUG. I had to pull out a substantial amount from the big skein, de-ply it, roll it back into a ball, then needle punch with it.

And why did I have to do this? BECAUSE I WAS USING THE WRONG FABRIC AND NEEDLE PUNCH FOR MAKING A WHOLE ASS RUG!!

I didn't know that the needle punch needle I had was an embroidery one, NOT a normal needle punch needle. Notice that it's small, and embroidery floss is the thing going through the hole and NOT size 4 yarn. And for the right, notice that it's also kinda small but the needle itself is a lot thicker, the channel that the yarn is going through is wider than the yarn itself- and that it's YARN AND NOT EMBROIDERY FLOSS.

Needless to say, it was aggravating and made the process take a lot longer than it should've. It wasn't impossible, I mean, you see him finished above and below, but it made it WAY more tedious, since a the thicker yard, even after being de-ply'd, still got stuck in the needle punch needle. After wresling with that off and on for... what about 4 months give or take, it was on to gluing and backing.

Going on the record to say that Tuft the World, Sam Made That, Shop Last., AJ MAKES, and BrokenBlvds' thread were the backbone of my glue searching, and rug-making experience. If you genuinely want to make a tuff rug (hand-punched or otherwise) their guides are so helpful <3

But for real, finding the right glue was a lot harder than anticipated. Many people said to use Roberts 3095 adhesive for rugs along with another glue, but I didn't have the funds for that, nor was planning to buy a whole gallon of rug glue I'd only for 1 project. I took up BrokenBlvds thread as my glue of choice, even though they were asking for something better. So far (about 3 months of use and a couple cleanings) the Roberts 6700 glue is holding up fine. The thing that isn't, is the yarn. After one vacuuming, fuzzies have been obscuring his eyes and junk. It's not bad, or even that noticeable, but I do miss his original state. That's what I get for using cheap yarn. I still love him to death tho.

Side tangent aside, I also used the 6700 because it has less of an odour, and I planned on bringing him to my dorm right when he was dry. While that was drying outside, I worked on the backing. The OG Floory rug had a nonslip backing attached (if I remember correctly), but mine does not! In similar fashion to the fabric of the rug itself, I also used left over fabric as his backing. For structure, I used some of my father's old uniform pants, and to make it more like dirt, I used an old bed sheet.

I stitched them together in a quilt-ish design so that the layers would be attached throughout the rug. That was a rush, but when I finished it I went out back and stuck it on there with a bit more Roberts 6700. When it was cured enough to come inside (3 days after gluing) I worked on the nonslip portion.

Had a rectangle of rug grip mat stuff, stuck some pins around the edges of Floory, traced the pins then cut it out. It's a little hard to see but looking up top, you can see a few of the pins sticking out around his edge.

After getting that, I released him from the frame, "pinked" his edges, and whip-stitched the edge shut.

That hurt my thumb SO FUCKIN BAD- Had to have pliers next to me for most of the whip-stitching, because it was so hard to get through the glue with a blunt needle. I used a blunt needle 'cause it was the only needle I had that could hold the yarn, and to keep in the spirit of the experiment... No way I was buying a needle when I had a needle that could technically work.

Now, in the name of the whole experiment, let me do a breakdown of the things I bought verse used:

Items Bought for project:

Green Red Heart Yarn - $15

Roberts 6700 Carpet Adhesive - $9

Wrong sized punch needle - $3

Total spent on Floory rug: $27

Items used in general:

9 different colours of yarn

About 1.5 yards of polyester/cotton blend fabric

1/2 of a flat sheet from a bedsheet set

1 pair of uniform pants

1 embroidery needle punch needle

4 (roughly) yard-long wood slots from a bed

Nails and screws (and the tools for those)

1 Staple gun & about 70 staples (I fucked up a lot of them & restapled)

A sewing machine

Pinking shears

Tapestry needles

etc...

Total if I had to buy all that: More than $45!

I put the lists side by side to say that I know saying "Oh just make it yourself" is easier said than done. If I didn't have all the shit I did, I would've just bought him myself like any sane person would. But no, I had the will and the materials, and I wanted The Floor in my dorm. And now here he is, along with my crazy ass Jhariah x hfjone bag...

That's for a different post- but forgive me, it's the most recent photo I have of him.

All and all, I had a good time working on him! It was very therapeutic to hunch on the floor of my living room and stab fabric a gazillion times to make The Floor from Inanimate Insanity. It drove me a bit inanimate insane, but honestly, I wake up every morning and see his face and it makes things better. So in reality, I guess you could say it was the friends I made along the way- thanks for watch

[peartourmaline]

Okami rug I’ve been working on for many months 😅

[revoltinglittleworm]

Lamb rug by Mars Kneale

[turboemmy]

before and after doing detail work on edgar rug! ^_^ i think id like to make him a wall hanging , hes not that big!

Would also love to put him up on my etsy when the backing is finished !!

[sibyllemathilde]

Haley Wood

“Truffling Hog”

[gummygunk]

招き兎

[clammyheart]

made another iteration of my ralsei splat rug from last year. honestly i like this one even more! changed the colors a little bit 🧶