Macrame, rope, knot wall hanging.
I've been dabbling in Macrame recently which is basically decorative rope work. Remember the old fashioned indoor plant hangers made of rope? They are what I want to make but the one I made didn't turn out that great and mainly because I didn't have enough rope (I bought 6 meter) I couldn't do any fancy rope work so it was the basic of all basic hangers and held the smallest pot ever :(
So when a good friend of mine gave me this....
I got a bit excited! 15 meters!!! Wahoooo!
As it turns out, the rope was a little too thick to make a plant hanger, it would have looked clunky. What to do with my rope? Well that's when the ex sailor came out in me, even 6 years after leaving her majesties finest, if a piece of rope falls into my hands I can't help messing around with it, whether it be basic bends & hitches or decorative knots.
I can't even tell you what I made, it started out as a Turks Head but instead of tightening the final loop I cut it in the middle of the slack loop and bound the ends together, I'll see if I can show you what I mean in pictures...
Wow, I don't know if this is a good diagram, I know how to make one so not sure if this is understandable with all the arrows, but anyways that is the basic shape, you have to make sure you have done the under and over weaves right or this will just fall to pieces. I also pinned it every now and then if you can see, just to keep it together so too sharp a tug didn't pull it all out, I also took this picture prematurely as the end of the rope should be going under as pointed out. Now you have that laid down you just chase the rope on the inside around as many times as you want. I've seen people actually make door mats with this method.
That is the whole 15 meters of rope there.
So what you need to do is start tightening the rope up, going around and around pulling it in and taking the slack off, this is where you end up with the big loop coming off of it. I got the center of it and cut it with scissors.
Now the rest of the shape I made coming off the rope work isn't any type of knot, I just arrange the loose rope to something I like the shape of.
To bind the ends I used a whipping but I found a diagram of it for you ^.^
Or a wrap knot as described here, it pulls all the loose rope ends in nice and tight whilst securing itself. And that's it. It kinda looks like one of those old rug beaters ha ha. Add a nice bit of nautical to your home and hang it on the wall. It may need a couple of stitches through parts to hold it together because if you swing this around too much it will start to flop. If you're putting it straight on your wall and your careful it should be ok, but you will know yourself whether it needs it or knot <<<sorry ha ha.
If you made this with thin enough rope or yarn you could even make this into a necklace or a bracelet. That's what i'm going to do next, this was quite time consuming and I lost my patience a few times when I stoppped to natter then forgot which way I was tightening, buuuut I'm happy with the end result and I'm even giving it to my mommy as a gift ha ha awww.
Hope it made some kind of sense! Thanks for reading!
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