What the Tuft?!

From childhood I have always been immersed in art. Any chance I could get, I would try a new way to create. Eventually I found a love for sewing in high school and with that passion I started designing clothing with the intention to go to school for fashion design. Unfortunately that didn't quite work out as my interest in fashion was so broad that I felt I needed to have more experiences than my college could provide. I began working in retail, studying cosmetology, studying graphic design, and studying the world always with how things translate into a more tactile art. I love textures and sculptural fashion more than anything.

Fast forward another ten years and now I'm living through a worldwide pandemic, shut in the house, and finding that I don't quite have have the space for the faux fur coat operation I had been brewing. After years of stifling my passion to grind for cash and make ends meet, I had recently decided I didn't want that life. I never did. So I had turned my eye back to fashion. With stay at home orders in full swing, and having recently moved thousands of miles across the country, I had found myself with a lot of free time and little obligation. I began obsessing over reigniting my creative spark and getting myself deep in the rabbit hole we call the internet. Somehow down the chain of videos, posts, websites, and feeds, I ended up on Instagram profiles of textile artists - then rug artists. Rugs are a neat form of artwork I had never previously considered. They are expressive, useful, full of texture, and really liven up a home. I looked deeper into the details and found videos of people making them and that's where I got hooked. Art with power tools? I was sold!

Luckily I did have enough garage space to set up a tufting frame and space in the house for a decently large desk. I also had plenty of time to burn and to learn. I quickly devoured videos and articles about the craft and messaged people who were devout rug makers to learn all I could before I began. It turns out, it is quite a costly craft and doing things on the scale I wanted would required specific, high-quality tools. I of course tried to cut a few corners when I began to keep costs down and quickly found out why these established rug makers I looked up to swore by certain fabrics, specific brands of machines, specific setups, hardware, scissors, etc. I would get halfway through a piece and the fabric would rip. Then I would have to brainstorm a way to mend or patch the tear which is much more painstaking a task then it sounds. You have to really assess the damage and how to repair it while keeping the surrounding fabric intact because it always rips in the middle where you need to keep tufting and not along the edge where it would be much more convenient. I tried a cheaper tufting gun and the circuit popped and started smoking literally thirty seconds in. I tried cheap scissors that could barely handle cutting through the rug glue and unscrewed their own hinge as I snipped. So I bit the bullet and took the plunge.

Now nearly a year later I find myself making the same tool and supply recommendations to newbies and even making a few personal recommendations of my own. I have specific fabric I use, a specific tufting gun, specific rug glue, powerarc scissors for cutting through that glue, sewing scissors for snipping threads, duckbill scissors for small area trimming (yes I upgraded from one pair of scissors to three, it was important!), pet clippers for large area trimming, specific backing fabric/felt, specific finishing supplies, specific everything. It's a science and I love it. I am someone who, while being a total creative mess, really enjoys organization in the workplace. Doing something so hands on and gritty, but also technical, allows me to combine my needs and passions to create something beautiful that my clients will adore daily in their homes. For me it is worth the cost of quality tools and supplies to be able to create something both beautiful and durable.