Couple of years back, we started tufting rugs. I felt an urge to move away from computers when everything was online. You guessed it, those were the days of COVID and I certainly was not the only one feeling so. To get a tufting gun those days, you’d have to set yourself an alarm for when the tool restocks and click your hand away to get it while you can.
We now again can move outside, meet and travel so the physical engagement is legally available again. It perhaps always have been, it’s only that it took a pandemic to make us re-consider our relationship to the screens.
So where was I before venturing into depths of human conditioning… Oh yes, I got the gun and canvas together with my flatmate Evička and thought to try it out straight away. It didn’t work as easily as expected so after 15 minutes, it went back to the box. Voila, end of the story. For now.
Fast forward another couple of years. I was moving houses and took the gun out of the box too. Together with my partner Ludka it suddenly worked. The main difference must have had been the fact that she had the patience and diligence it requires, while for me this was a skill I’m slowly acquiring. We took out that same old frame we set out years ago and finished it in two evenings. How refreshing and inspiring! We did the whole piece together, but one couldn’t tell like they could if it was a painting or a drawing. We kept swapping the tools and spools, one at the time. It would be her tufting for a bit while I’d be rolling the spools of the wool on the ground for her. Then we change. No one would tell the other what to do, which colour to pick or where to tuft. Colourful improvisation, fun and actual pretty decent compositions.
This whole experience opened a new dimensions of collaborative working I only knew from realms of improvised music. I now experienced that horizontal discussion that is both fun and meaningful could be held in time “over” work of visual art just as well as “in” time when composing life music in discussion with other players. Here, take a look! 🙂
As you can see, tufting as a textile art technique can be quite expressive and intuitive. Instead of a solid state machine threading yarn, it threads it through the canvas, injecting short bits of yarn into it as the tufting gun navigates it freely up and down, left and right.
So this is how we re-started. Now my son Mateo felt very intrigued by the wool spools and the softness and colours of the rug. Naturally he wanted to give it a go too. He’s been helping with spooling and undoing the spool but now he’s also trying to tuft and is making progress. Frankly, he’s probably doing better than I was when I was starting 🙂
Recently, we decided we’ll start a large rug to fit in our living room. 300 centimetres wide, 140 tall. All three of us sat down to sketch up proposals. We took inspiration from the patterns of the Persian carpets on sale – a leaflet I brought in from Germany the other day. They share certain features like distinct framing pattern, central pattern fragmenting and repeating throughout the surface of the carpet and the overall symmetricity. We took that and designed something that would seem traditional, but with built in systemic imperfections introduced by lack of our free hand drawing precession and free hand manual tufting. And of course a slight overdose of boldness, confidence and imagination. Mateo’s suggestion won as it kept all the patterns required and turned out to be most imprecise and therefore the boldest and the most intriguing 🙂
Ludka proceeded to precisely copy paste the imperfect sketch on the large canvas while we were preparing the material for future carpet.
And than we went ahead and started the big one.
Below are images of how we’re progressing. I’ll try to update these as we progress. Hope to have it ready soon, although the big one really seems to take a while, and it eats through the yarn like it hasn’t eaten anything for years. The material we use is all sourced from our mothers closets, where they kept their knitting supplies for decades, literally. Their compressed into balls, cakes, skeins or hanks… all sorts of shapes, none of which is ideal for tufting which requires smooth and fast yarn flow. But than, its often actual sheep wool, it is using what is already produced, and it has the added sentimental and perhaps environmental value too. So we unwind and rewind them with spooler. Extra effort but so far feels worth it.
