Tufting Essentials: From Beginner to Rug Artisan

1. Intro: Hi everyone, welcome to the course. My name's Andrew and I'm the founder of Scattered Kind. Today I'm going to be your instructor as I walk you through the entire process of tufting your very first rug. Before tufting, I actually started my career in the corporate world. I was desperately looking for some sort of creative outlet so I could express myself outside of work. And that's where I discovered tufting and immediately I was hooked. I just kept making these rugs over and over again. And as I made each rug, I started to realize more and more that this is my purpose and this is where I belong. So at a certain point I ended up making the jump and following my heart. And I quit my job and started scattered kind at the studio. We host workshops, We introduce tufting to our students and guide them through the entire process of creating their very first rug. Now my goal is to share my knowledge and expertise with as many people as possible. So that's why I'm creating this video course. In today's course, I'm going to be guiding you through everything. The materials, the set up, tufting, straight lines, curved lines. And finally, I'm going to walk through the finishing process. So you can end up with a rug just like this. So let's dive in. 2. Materials Overview: Before we actually get into it, I'm just going to go over a bunch of materials that you guys would need in order to create your very first rug. So for all of these materials, the links would be down below in the description. The first thing we're going to be starting with is the tufting gun. There are two types of tufting guns out there. One is called the cut pile gun and the other is called the loop pile gun. So for the purposes of this course, we're going to be focusing on the cut pile gun. It's definitely the gun that I recommend and the gun that I prefer. Just because the cut pile gun has a pair of scissors already attached to the gun, it creates a shaggier feeling, softer texture, and it's just overall a lot easier to use. Next thing we'll want to focus on is the yarn itself. This is very, very important that we choose the right yarn that fits the requirements of our project as well as our budget. So our studio definitely prefers using red hard super saver yarn. It's a really, really common acrylic yarn that you can find at most arts and craft stores. And again, it just has a wide variety of colors that we can choose from. If you did have a little bit of a higher budget, I definitely recommend looking into wool yarn. So wool yarn is definitely higher quality than acrylic yarn, and it's definitely better for the environment as well. The only downside here is that the colors for wool yarn are not as vibrant as acrylic y. When it comes to the form of this yarn, we definitely prefer using cones over skins or yarn balls. This is just the easiest way to have the yarn feed nice and easy into the gun. And it just makes the easiest experience possible. If you don't have a yarn cone winder or if you were having trouble finding yarn cones, you can still use the yarn straight out of the skin. Or you can buy a yarn ball winder which is a lot more accessible. Some last couple items we'll need is a projector to trace our designs. Some clamps to clamp our frame to the table. Some fabric scissors, some wire just to thread our gun. Some tweezers for gun maintenance. We'll want some sewing machine oil just to make sure the gun is nice and lubricated. Finally, we'll want a electric air duster just to make sure all the little bits of dust that collects throughout our project is nice and cleaned off once you guys finish tufting. Another important component to consider is the glue. Traditionally, people have been using this glue right here. This is ruggedhesive that you can find at most home improvement stores. But for the purposes of this course, we'll be using this liquid latex from tufting nation. We definitely prefer using this liquid latex just because it's a lot easier to use than this rugged adhesive right here. And it does create a much, much cleaner finished product versus this glue. With our liquid latex, we'll be using two different types. One right here is the 100 and the other right here is the 200. We'll go a little bit more in depth into the differences of these glues later. But just to summarize, the 100 glue is a lot more liquidy and the 200 glue is a lot more pasty. Just note that for our project we'll be using both glues. The final thing we'll need for our gluing is our backing for liquid latex. We'll be using a mesh backing. You can find this ad pretty much any textile store, any fabric store. The only important thing to note here is that if you will be using the traditional glue, you'll need a fabric backing instead of mesh. So for gluing and finishing, some materials we'll need are a paint roller, a pair of electric scissors, a rug carver, a guard for the rug carver, an animal hair comb, and finally, an animal hair vacuum. I definitely recommend using an animal hair vacuum over a regular vacuum just because it's really effective at getting all of that dust out of your rug. Okay, next we have our tufting frame. So this will essentially be the canvas that you'll all be working on, and this is what we're going to be tufting on, as well as gluing our rugs down on. So to build a frame, essentially all we'll need are a couple of planks of wood, some 2.5 inch screws, some eye hooks, and finally we'll just need some carpet taps. So these carpet tax strips are pretty easy to find, you can find them at any sort of home improvement store. And lastly, what we'll need is our tufting fabric. So this will be the fabric that's stretched across our frame, and this is what we'll actually be tufting on. You can find this fabric at a bunch of different tufting websites, but you can also find this on Amazon. 3. Preparing Your Frame: Now that we've covered all of our materials, we can start to actually prepare our frame. The first things we're going to do is just stretch our tupping fabric over the frame. It's very important that we do stretch this fabric as tight as we can, because a loose piece of fabric on the frame is going to cause a ton of holes and a ton of ribs. So we're just going to unfold our fabric. First thing we're going to do is just drape it over the entire frame, just like that. The first thing we're going to do is we're just going to start to latch on the two sides of the fabric. Just start pulling on both sides and get them nice and locked onto those tax strips. Next we're just going to start locking on the bottom of the fabric. Again, keep pulling so that they can attach to the tax strips. Something to keep in mind here is to keep using those lines on your fabric to make sure that you're stretching everything as nice and as straight as possible. Next, we're just going to flip it over and move it over and start stretching the top of the frame. Now what we're going to do, we're just going to really, really tighten all four sides. Now our fabric is stretched, the lines are nice and straight. And one left thing we're going to do just to make sure that the tension is strong enough, we're going to do something called the phone test. We're just going to take our phone and all we're going to do is just drop it on top of the fabric. If the phone bounces, then we have our fabric tight enough. Bounce, we know we're good. 4. Design Tips: There's a couple of guidelines we want to follow, especially when creating our very first tufted rug design. So first and foremost, we want to make sure that this design is as simple as possible. I always like to tell my students who enter our studio, less is definitely more. So we want to make sure our designs have nice, big, easy shapes. We want to reduce as many intricate, small designs as possible. And we want to try to keep the number of colors to a minimum, so about 56 colors. This is all to ensure that we can tuft the cleanest rug possible, and also make sure that any sorts of mistakes would be avoided. Next, we want to avoid having any gradients in our design. Gradients are near impossible to tuft, so we want to make sure that our entire design is nice and color blocked, and we have nice, clean lines. So this is a good example of a first rug design. As you can see here, the design is not overly intricate and the colors are at a minimum. Another good first rug design. As you can see, it does have a bit of a black outline. But if you look at the different sections, you can still see that they're nice and big, and easy to tuft. Finally, for the purposes of this course, we'll be making the scattered logo. As you can see, it has big thick outlines and big sections to color in. 5. Tracing Your Design: Now we'll trace our design onto the actual fabric. There's two things to keep in mind here. For one, we just want to make sure we're mirroring our design because this is the back of the rug we're going to be working on. The actual rug is going to come out on this side. We also just want to make sure that we're leaving about four fingers of space between the design and the edge of the frame. Our designs trace. So we're just going to color code everything. 6. Tufting Gun Setup: We're traced, we're color coded, and we're ready to start tufting. So first we're just going to prepare this frame over here. If you look on the top of the frame, we have two hooks right here. So we're just going to take our two strands of yarn and put them right through the two hooks. Next we'll be threading the actual gun, so there's two holes we'll be threading the yarn through. First there's this bigger top hoop right here. And then if you look at the top of the needle, there's a small little hole right on the top of the needle. So these are going to be the two holes we're going to thread both of our yarn strands through. So we're going to take our two strands of yarn and just put it through that bigger top hoop. Next for that smaller hole, you're going to want to use your wire. This is very similar to threading a needle, but essentially we're going to go upwards through the bottom of that hole. And we're just going to take our two strands of yarn, put it through the wire, and pull the wire back down. Now you can see there's this little tail kind of hanging off the needle. So we just want to pull up until there's just about 2 " of tail. Some little safety things we want to keep in mind. If you have longer hair, just make sure you tie it up. We just want to avoid anything getting caught inside this gun, around the edges of the frame here. We want to be careful not to kick ourselves in the hands on any of those tax strips. And finally, if you see right here, we have a little on off switch for the gun. And there's a little light right here telling you if the gun is on or off. The biggest thing here is just to make sure the gun is always off when you're not tufting. 7. Tufting Gun Operation: The best way to imagine this gun is to view this similar to a sewing machine. Similar to how a sewing machine moves the fabric and feeds the fabric. And the person being the guide the gun works just like that. So if I'm holding the gun like this and I start pulling the trigger, the gun itself is going to start moving up. And our job is more so to just guide the gun. So that's kind of the first lesson to remember out of all of this, which is when we're tufting, we do not want to force that movement and push the gun upwards. We just want to let the gun at its own speed and its own pace. And we're just kind of following along with our arms. The two body parts we want to keep in mind are our shoulders and our arms. So starting with our shoulders, we just want to make sure we're nice and square with the frame. So what I see a lot is people start eventually standing like this. And I totally get it because you can get a good view of the gun from this angle. But if you're standing sideways, you just don't have the same level of control or the same range of motion as standing straight on like this. So just make sure you're nice in front of this frame. And then in terms of our arms, we just want to make sure we're extending them out enough where our front arm is almost fully extended. Because if we have both of our arms really close to our body like this, we don't give the gun a lot of room to move, so we kind of restrict the movement of the gun. So just make sure you extend your arms out so you have a nice full range of motion. So another important point we'll want to remember is to make sure that this gun is always perpendicular to this fabric whenever we're tufting. So what I mean by that is, let's say I'm doing another line going upwards. What we need to avoid having the gun do is something like that, where it's like you only let the front of the gun move up and you're leaving this back part anchor down. So see how it's starting to angle a bit like this, right? If the gun does angle too much, you can see that the needle is popping out of that fabric. And you're going to have all the same issues with not applying enough pressure. So it's really going to start destroying your fabric. So you need to make sure as you guys are tufting, instead of seeing the gun move like that, you want to let the gun move as one complete unit, just like this. This next part is going to be the most important thing to remember out of everything I'm going to tell you here. So when you stab into the fabric, you really need to make sure you're applying a good amount of pressure into the fabric. So pressure is the number one thing that creates those holes in rips. It really slows people down. It creates a lot of just really ugly looking lines. So you really need to make sure you're applying a good amount of pressure here. So what you want is these two metal feet right here. These should be completely pressed up against the fabric. So a common mistake people make is they'll only put about half of that needle in and then start pulling the trigger. But you want the entire needle to be in until you can't press in anymore. And then you should also see a little bit of an indent on the fabric. So to make this as easy as possible for you, if this is your body position while you guys are tufting, just make sure you're leaning inwards just a little bit just so you can rely more so on your body weight versus your arm strength. It would look essentially something like this. To reiterate, we want our shoulders nice and square with the frame. We want to make sure our arms are nice and extended. We want to be applying pressure onto the fabric. We want to make sure the gun is perpendicular. The very last thing we want to keep in mind is when we're tufting, we want to be tapping the trigger versus holding the trigger down. It just gives you a lot more control over the gun and make sure your lines come out a lot more accurate. You got a nice little line just like that. So I'm going to do it again. I'm going to stab the needle in right next to that previous line, and I'm going to start tapping the trigger. As you can see, we have two lines right here. They're going to be nice and flat on this back side, but all the fluffiness is going to come out on this side. Now that we tufted our first set of lines, there's just a couple little best practices that I want to cover with you. So first, every single time before you start tufting, just pull on this little string right here. We just don't want any slack going down here. Because if they're slack here, this is what's getting caught, wrapped around the gun, getting caught up in your hands, getting caught up in the gear right here, and you're just going to have a big issue. So just make sure you talk on those two little strings next in terms of pressure. So a very common habit that I see when it comes to pressure is that people will always start with the perfect amount of pressure. But then as the gun starts moving, people start kind of easing up. But obviously you don't want to be doing that, because that would make the first half of your line nice. But then the second half of your line is going to get all messy and it's going to start destroying your rug. So we just want to make sure that as we're tufting, we keep our arms nice and locked out and we have consistent pressure all the way through up until we completely let go of the trigger. The gun completely stops and then let's pull out. So never ease up on your pressure otherwise or else again, you're going to start destroying your rug. You're gonna start creating a bunch of little holes in order to have the most control over this gun. You always want to make sure you're tufting shoulder level. Shoulder level will always be a lot more comfortable and a lot more controlled versus holding the gun down here or holding the gun up here as you're working. I definitely recommend if you do have an adjustable table to raise and lower the frame as you desire or to actually use a seat if you're working on lower parts. So when it comes to the lines themselves, there's a couple things you want to be looking out for. So one is the actual spacing between the lines, and then two is the actual texture of the lines. So first with the spacing, we don't want all of our lines to be touching each other. It does create a lot of tension on the fabric, so at a certain point, the yarn might break through. So we do want to have a millimeter or two of space in between each of these lines. So you should be able to see a little bit of tufting fabric in between each of these lines. So as you're tufting, just stab the needle right next to that previous line you just tufted. Just make sure you're not stabbing directly into that previous line. And as long as you follow along, you can see that there's a little space in between the lines. But that'll be okay because on this side it would be covered up since the yarn flays out and fluffs out on the front side. When it comes to the texture of our lines, what we're looking for is a nice corn on the cob texture. As you can see, there's a bunch of bubbles going throughout these lines. So that's what we want to be looking for. If you do hold back the gun, or if you restrict that movement on the gun, you'll see your lines starting to look like this. So as you can see, these bubbles are nonexistent. Or they're extremely, extremely skinny. If you see lines that don't have that corn on the cop texture, generally that would mean that you're holding back the gun. What you want to be doing is loosening up so that you can let the gun move more freely. If you see your lines start to come out looking like this. So you might notice that it does have that corn on the cob texture. But if we were to compare these bubbles to these ones right here, you can see that these bubbles here are a lot wider. So essentially what I did for this line was I forced that movement, I kind of pushed the gun upwards. So this line on the other side is going to be really, really sparse. So if you ended up filling the entire rug with these types of lines on this back side, it might look good, it might look like you completed everything. But over here, your rug is going to be very sparse, very bald, and very incomplete. So essentially what we're trying to do with these two lines is find that nice balance in between the two of not pushing the gun up too much and not holding the gun back. It's just a matter of practice. It's just a matter of learning curve. Everyone will get to this corn on the com point. If you did not apply enough pressure or if you did angle the gun too much, then basically the lines will start to come out looking like this. See how this line is not nice and flat like these ones? See how it's all messy. It's all coming out towards our side. If you ever see anything like this, this is a sign that you're probably not applying enough pressure or you're angling the gun too much. I'd say just pull all of these out. You can go right back in to redo that line. But let's say for example, we did do a good line, but let's say we just kind of went off into the wrong section. We could still easily just pull any of this yarn out and redo those lines. So no pressure, none of this is permanent. A lot of this can be edited and undone. We just want to try to minimize the amount that we pull out from the fabric, because the more we do, the more damage the fabric gets. So we just run a little bit more risk of creating holes a. 8. Advanced Tufting Tips: Now that you're comfortable with your vertical lines, we'll want to start focusing on some turns and curves. The way that turns and curves work is that the gun will always be moving in the direction that these two feet right here are pointing. That's why holding the gun normally like this, these two feet are pointing upwards. The gun moves up. But let's say for example, we wanted to move to the right. The really important thing you need to make sure you're not doing is something like that, where you're dragging the gun across that way. If you drag the gun like that, you're essentially going to slice the fabric. If you slice the fabric, you're going to lose the tension on the fabric. If you lose the tension on the fabric, you can't even tuft on it anymore. So it does render the rug useless. So it's very important that we do not drag the gun like that. Instead of dragging it, we're going to use this back handle and we're just going to rotate it. Now you can see these two feet are pointed to the right, so the guns going to move to the right. So it's very important as you guys are tufting to make sure that the gun only moves in the direction of these two feet right here. Because what I see often is people would turn the gun like this. So ideally the gun should be going diagonal, but some people will try to force it to go completely horizontally. And again that just destroys the entire rug and just makes it unusable and untufftablef example I'm going to stab in right here. And now let's say I want to move to the right, so all I'm going to do is just turn my back handle just like this, so this front handle is more so for comfort. This won't control anything with the steering, it's all done from this back handle. And then very important when you're doing your turns and curves to still keep in mind all the points we went over before. What often happens is people will be very focused on these turns and curves that they forget about everything else we went over. So still make sure you're applying good pressure. Still make sure everything's nice and perpendicular. And again, continue to tap the trigger, so you got a nice little right angle just like that. But obviously as you guys are working on your designs, they're not just going to be easy right angles, they're going to be a little bit more curvy, a little bit more smooth. So this is especially where working in bursts matters the most. So when I say work in bursts, I mean quick, tiny little taps, almost as if you're going bubble by bubble. Because every single time you do these tiny little taps, you can slightly adjust the gun as you go to get a really smooth, clean, accurate line. For example, let's say instead of this right angle, I wanted to do a right curve. It would look something like this. So as you can see, this came out more curvy, a lot more smooth. So this is especially the point where you want to be working a little bit slower because when you're working on your details, you obviously have to be a lot more accurate versus working on a big chunk of color. And finally, when it comes to these turns and curves, the last thing we want to keep in mind is just our body position. So if you're a leftie like me, you'll always have an easier time moving to the right. And if you're a righty, you'll have an easier time moving to the left. And that's just because of the nature of how our body works. Because you are most likely holding the gun with your dominant hand as the back handle. And it's always going to be easier for you to do this with your arm versus this with your arm. It's just a very weird, awkward position. So I say that because as you guys are tufting, feel free to start and stop wherever makes you feel the most comfortable. Always go in the direction that gives you the most comfort. 9. Tufting Your Rug: What we want to start focusing on first is all of these outlines, we want to get all those little details out of the way before filling in the rest of the rug. So what I'm going to start doing now, I'm going to start tracing all of these different outlines. I'm just going to stab right into the marker and I'm just going to start tracing. Now we've finished our first rug, so all we're going to do is flip this over and work on some finishing touches before we start gluing. The very last thing we'll want to do is to tweeze out any of the little overlapping lines we created. So as you can see here in this brown section, we have a little bit of messiness with the blue because we accidentally overlap just a little bit. So this is what we'll want to start tweezing out. So I'm just going to go in and I'm just going to go thread by thread, being careful to only pull out those little blue pieces of yarn. And as you can see, the section is starting to be cleaned up. Now that we finish tweezing, we can get to gluing down our rug. 10. Gluing Your Rug: To glue down our rugs, we'll be using two different types of liquid latex, 100.200, The 100 is a lot more liquid of a consistency, so we'll be using this paint roller here to apply it. As for the 200, it's a little bit thicker, so we just need to be using some sort of scraper tool. This right here is a cake cutter, but you could also use a putty knife finally, just because the glue can get messy and it could mess up your clothes. Just make sure you're using an apron as you're gluing. Let's get started with the 100. So I'm just going to dip my paint roller into the 100 glue. And now I'm just going to spread it onto the surface of the rug. And we just want to make sure that every single part of the rug is nice and saturated with the glue. Don't be afraid to dip the roller back into the glue so you can get full coverage on the rug. We fully covered the rug with the 100, so let's move on to the 200. Before we apply the 200 glue, we'll just want to add this mesh backing on top of the rug. So I'm just going to drape this over the entirety of the rug. And now I'm just going to take some scissors and cut out any parts of the mesh that's making contact with the tacks on the frame we have the mesh on. So now we're going to start applying this 200 glue. The goal of this is to get a nice thin layer across the entire rug. We don't want to have any of this 200 caked on because it gets super, super thick. We're going to start gluing along the same direction as the lines that we made when we were tufting. So as you can see, most of our lines are going down this way. So this is the direction that we're going to start scraping. I'm just going to use one hand to hold down the mesh and we're just going to start scraping again. We're getting a nice thin layer across the entire surface of the rug. Any of this excess, you can just put it back into the bucket. I like to go in with my hands at the very end just to make sure that there's complete contact with all the mesh throughout the entire rug. So we're all done with gluing. So we're just going to let this out to dry for about a day. 11. Trimming Your Rug: We're gonna cut this rug out from the frame. As we're cutting, we're going to want to leave a couple of inches of excess fabric around the rug. Let's start taking off this excess fabric. I personally like to use a pair of electric scissors, but if you want, you can always use any pair of fabric scissors. Finally, we're just going to do one more once around just to make sure that all of that excess fabric is cut off right along the edge of the rug. We want as little excess fabric as possible. I'm going to start shaping down the surface of this rug to make everything nice and flat. And even throughout. For this, I'm going to be using my rug carver as well as the guard for the rug carver. So I have my carver on the rug and what I'm going to do after I turn it on is put my two hands on the two sides of the guard and start letting it glide across the surface with a nice even pressure. Don't apply too much pressure onto the guard or else you're going to start digging too deep into your rug. The surface is nice and flat. I can already see these details coming out a lot. So to finish it off, I took the guard off the buzzer and we're just going to start cleaning up all of these edges. We're just about done. The very last thing we want to do is use this animal hair comb to get out the last little bits of dust. And then we're just going to use this vacuum to vacuum it all up. Now I want you guys to remember, no one's first painting is ever amazing. Tufting is a learned skill, just like any other art form. So if in the beginning you're getting a little discouraged because the first rug is not turning out as great as you want. The more you practice, the more you get your hands on that gun, the more you'll be able to reach that creative vision. Thanks so much for coming with me on this journey. Wishing you the best of luck, and I hope tufting brings you as much joy as it's brought me. Oh.