My First Hand-Tufted Carpet

I tried tufting the first time earlier this year.

It was my first time using a gun. Well, it was a tufting gun. I was quite fond of it, so I’ll fondly share with you the documentation I’ve made along the way.

After firmly stretching out and mounting the tufting fabric that we use as the canvas to a wooden frame, I marked the sketches on the fabric what I wanted to do. I guess it was not too hard to figure out what I wanted to make here.

I wish I had done some capture of the thrilling process of controlling the tufting gun. It was quite a bit of struggles taming it in the beginning. I could feel its desire of escaping my hand whenever I started to move it around.

Of course, it was a hot mess.

The “drawing” process was rather straightforward. Given the instruction by the artist lady, I first drew the outline in the image. In this case, it would be the prism and the colorful rainbow rays. Then filled out the background.

It wasn’t a smooth sail in the beginning, when the yarns kept breaking going through the feeder of the gun. Now looking back, I am genuinely surprised that I still got time to snap a photo of my work in progress, especially my process was seemingly way far behind others…

The yarns we use were charged by weight. So we have to weigh the spools every time before and after I used them. From the design you probably could tell it involves quite a bit of color switching, and as a result, weighing. I have to come up with some creative way to save me some time.

But anyways, here is what it looked like after I have finished the main part of the work. The artist lady was helping me to unmount the frame, so that I could take it out and apply glue to fix the design.

The street next to Limmat was quietly lit by the yellow road light. That’s really when I realized: “oh and it was night time already.” Probably 5 hours in… I didn’t notice the passage of time at all.

Leaving it dry for a few days, this was what it looked like :)

I also went on making a little wooden frame around the carpet.

so I could nicely show my carpet on top of my shelf.

It was really a fond memory.