The Lost Art of Rug Hooking

I am totally in love with the idea of this rug! But anyone who knows me shouldn't be surprised as I like stripes, vintage, and anything remotely psychedelic looking. 

The squares can be kept separate for rearranging or sewn together for a full rug. Be forewarned: these rugs take quite a long time to hook, so do this only if you have lots of free time. Or, I guess if you want to be working on it for years - whatever. 

On the contrary, these knots don't take too long to learn - mostly just muscle memory. You only need to buy a rug hook (which is still sold in most kits in craft stores) as well as the pre-cut yarn. In recent years, I find this proves to be slightly difficult as rug-hooking is a dying art, but you may be able to come across these yarn pieces online.

 

Of course, the fun part is that you can do whatever colors you want. I like this little chart that explains the reasons why you would pick each colorway - a little color theory here and there.  

 

And design your own! It's quite easy to design nearly anything on graph paper and make a rug out of it. I would encourage playing with other geometric patterns because that's what I love, but you could potentially trace any photo onto graph paper and plot it out on the rug canvas. See below for more tips.

 

And here is the rug that my mom and I have been working on for YEARS now. I don't know when my mom bought this, but I would venture to guess it was sometime in the 70s my mom bought this thing. It's actually a Christmas tree skirt. I remember being about 10 years old and my mom working on this (that was 16 years ago.) To her credit, she did make a "Noel" hanging rug thing which I still have. 

Here is Max, working a few rows on the Christmas tree skirt. I taught him how to do this in about 5 minutes.  Easy to do, but tedious. And impressive!