Week 1

So this first week was more skill building and preparation than anything. As my thesis is based around rug making, it is important for me to have practice not only with using my gun, but also with securing the backing of the pieces, shaving down the uneven sections, and deciding how they will be hung up. Over break, I had started a frame of rugs and ended up having a lot of smaller spaces to mess around with, so I made myself a small "tapestry" and a tufted wall flower to go along with my new rug. This gave me some hanging methods to play around with, as one piece is abnormally shaped and can't easily be hung with a dowel, and the other is rectangular and aids itself to dowel hanging.

I also got to play around with shaving down my floor rug. A tufting gun does a pretty decent job of making most of the threads even, but it's not perfect and some sections end up being uneven, as well as thread that didn't get cut by the machine needing to be trimmed down. I don't have anything fancy, but I borrowed a beard trimmer from my boyfriend and that did the job pretty well. Definitely slow, but effective nonetheless.