Tufting On TikTok, ‘Renegade’ Rug Makers Create Group : NPR

While Justin Clarke was flipping through his TikTok feed last summer, a tufted video came on his screen. He was addicted.

In these TikTok videos, tufts draw with an industrial metal tool, creating textured zigzags and bright curves on a blank canvas. Her tufting guns shoot out yarn in shaggy lines of color.

“I have to try that,” recalls the 19-year-old multimedia artist. “I’ll try every project, even if it fails.” So he bought a tufting gun.

In a 17-second video for Kali Uchis’ “Telepatía”, Clarke brings his sketch for a tufted mirror to life.

The mechanics of TikTok’s video format unexpectedly work with the meditation process of tufting, says Trish Andersen, a fiber artist from Savannah, Ga.

“There is a nice moment when you are working with this where you basically have to be in sync with the speed of the gun and the yarn has to be in sync and everything has to work in that minute or second for the stitch to work,” says Andersen. Her work can be seen on her personal website Instagram and of course on TikTok.

Andersen grew up in the carpet business in her hometown of Dalton, Georgia. Punch needle work helped establish Dalton’s industry in the early 20th century, and it was there that the first tufting machine was invented in the 1930s. The city now proudly calls itself the carpet capital of the world. Dalton still produces most of the carpets in America. Andersen explored other forms of media before realizing the creative potential of industrial tufting tools. She relied on videos and manuals from industrial carpet manufacturers while teaching herself how to make art with a tufting gun.

“It already exists. It’s not a new tool,” Andersen says of her shiny electric weapon. “It was only used in a manufacturing process, not in arts and crafts.”

Mass-produced carpeting is designed to blend in all of the neutral colors, straight lines, and sensible patterns under the feet and under the furniture. Carpets can be as creative as a plastered wall. But making carpets as a form of self-expression is not new. Fragments of centuries-old ornate carpets can be found in museums around the world, with different cultures cultivating their own unique methods and patterns over time. The fiber art movement that flourished in the 1960s solidified the medium as refined enough for the white halls of art galleries.

Today, the technology that made factory tufted carpets so widespread and standardized is helping independent artists. Tufting links these artists to an older tradition of personal, tactile carpet-making while also taking into account the mechanical efficiency of the weapon.

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“It’s like a paintbrush. You use it just like any other tool,” says Andersen. “It’s not like knitting where you can just buy a book about knitting and then learn the stitches. It’s still a little bit renegade at this point.”

Most large craft shops still do not stock tuft rifles. However, the growing popularity of tufting is reflected in data from sites like Tuftinggun.com, which found sales increased 648% in November and December 2020 over the same period in 2019 before the pandemic. Tufters make rugs that look like Pokémon characters, candy wrappers, and abstract art. For some people, they might be the equivalent of fluffy posters in the bedroom. For Justin Clarke, whose videos can be found on his TikTok account @rugguyjustin, tufting is a powerful form of portraiture.

“It has a lot to do with my own image of myself, my body, and my facial features – Afrocentric features – that I previously didn’t consider appealing,” says Clarke. “But after I grew up and found her more beautiful, I wanted to integrate her into my art.” Clarke thought that tufting was the best medium for examining the body because “if you don’t find beauty in yourself and you have no self-worth, people can walk all over you, you know … like a carpet”. “”

Tufting is a lonely and deeply personal process. With online spaces, tufts can promote the community, share techniques, and show how art should be anywhere – on your walls, in your TikTok feed, and on your floor.

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