 Good morning, everybody. I am so excited for today's video. This is a video I have been wanting to film for months now. I have been caught up on TikTok for the past couple of months watching people create rugs using a rug tufting gun. And I got one of my own, and today we are going to be going through the entire process of creating our very own rug. I have absolutely zero skill set with a rug tufting gun. This is actually a little bit intimidating, you guys. I think rug making has become really popularized lately through social media, so rug guns have been kind of hard to come by. I actually sat on my computer for hours one day on an eBay auction, trying to get this rug gun, and I ended up winning the auction. So I was very, very excited to be able to get this rug tufting gun. This is a cut pile gun, if you were curious. There is a loot pile, a cut pile, and I believe you can also get guns that have both in them. Something about the rug making process just looks so satisfying to me. I love that all you have to use is a simple yarn. You can go with acrylic, cotton, or wool, and you can also just go ahead and create whatever shape you want, whatever design you want, whatever size you want, and it just seems like a whole bunch of fun. I also wanna thank today's video sponsor, Ritual. They are an incredible multivitamin brand made by women for women, and a lot of you guys are like, wait, why are you taking this then? Do not worry, you guys. They have essential vitamins for men, children, and women. However, their main product is the woman's multivitamin made by women for women, of course, and the reason I'm kind of touching on that aspect is because 94% of my channel is composed of women. Now, I've been taking my Ritual vitamins for about almost two weeks now, and you guys, I have been absolutely loving them. I am somebody that I'm not going to lie to you guys. I'm a little bit of a hypochondriac. 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You kind of have to do each one one by one, but if you do have a rug tufting gun, the process goes so much quicker and you can create rugs a lot faster. So let's go ahead and talk about the supplies. Of course, the first thing is your rug tufting gun. Then you're also going to need some yarn to use within your gun. You can go with cotton, acrylic, or wool, whatever you wanna go for, a pair of scissors, and then as far as the backing material, you can either use monk's cloth, which does cost a little bit more, or you can go with the cheaper alternative, which was burlap, and I also felt like the burlap was honestly easier to use. And last but not least, you're going to need some form of frame. Now, I personally suggest just grabbing a large canvas at the craft store, pulling the canvas off the front and using it as your frame. So the first thing we are going to do is create our frame for our piece. Now, a lot of people here on YouTube or on TikTok have proper frames for this process. However, I'm going to be kind of DIYing my own. I've done a lot of weaving in the past, and I always use just canvases, basically, like the canvas-based frame here. I got this at Joanne's. You can use a 50% off coupon and get a good discount on one of these large canvases. Let's go ahead and create our frame and get started. I'm a little bit nervous, but I'm also very excited because if it works, this is gonna be so much fun. Creating the frame is super simple. I went ahead and bought this 3x3 canvas at the craft store. Make sure to use a coupon at Joanne's or Michael's whenever you go, so you can get it for a half off and just go ahead and remove the canvas from the inside. Now, as you can see, there are a couple of diagonal bars going across, but my designs are gonna be pretty small, so I just went ahead and left those for now, but you can totally go in and pull those out if you'd like to. Now, next, we're going to go ahead and put our fabric on our actual frame. So I'm going to start off with my burlap fabric, making sure just to pull it as taut as possible and using a staple gun to adhere it, or I guess staple it, down to the wood all the way around using a generous amount. You're basically going to want to be fabric to be pretty taut on there, but still have a little bit of movement. Finding the design is honestly my favorite part of the process. I just go on Pinterest and search rug tufting, or you can also search patches because there are so many different patches online that you can kind of recreate. Now, keep in mind, if you do not have a projector like this one right here, I do suggest going with something very simple that could be kind of flipped either way because you're going to want to actually mirror your image and flip it. So if you wanted to do this logo, for example, you're going to want to flip it and then trace it onto your piece with a projector. However, I do not own a projector. So I just went ahead and did designs that can look great both ways, such as that egg rug. I thought it would be a perfect starting point since it's only two colors, white and yellow, and I can also just kind of freehand and organically draw it out. I used a bowl for the yolk section and then I freehanded out the other part of the egg. Alrighty guys, this is the little setup that I created here. I already went ahead, I drew on my design. As you can see, I don't have a projector. I think I already mentioned it. And basically what you want to do is when you do have a projector is reverse your image. So I just did an image that would look kind of great both ways if it wasn't reversed. So this is an egg shape, which I think is really cute. And I think it's a great kind of starting piece because there's only two colors and there's just a couple of shapes in here. So I'm going to start off with this one. And I basically have this kind of propped up to where the full entire backside is exposed. And I'm basically just using the sandbags to hold it against here. That way when I tuft on the front side here with the gun, doesn't hit anything. It stays in place. And I feel like this is a pretty good setup. And I'm very excited to get started. I ended up getting two of the yellow and four of the white. And the reasoning for this is that when you actually use a rug gun, you want two strands in your rug gun at all times. So you're actually going to thread it with two pieces. It's going to thicken up the rug process and just make it go by a little bit quicker. And all around just using one strand just doesn't give you that density that you want for a rug. So I got two of the yellow, four of the white. Now this is the cheapest yarn you can get at Joanne's. This was three for $9. It's just the Red Heart brand, if you're curious. It looks like this. We're going to go ahead and thread up the machine and get started. I have the gun threaded. I mean, all there is now is to go ahead and start creating the shape, which I'm kind of scared about. I'm going to go ahead and turn it on here. This is the trigger that you're going to pull to basically make the gun go. This down here is the speed. So you can twist it back and forth to increase or decrease the speed. And those are really the only settings, the speed and go. Like am I supposed to do the outside line first? Like how? Oh my God. You guys, am I doing it? Yeah. Am I doing it? The yarn broke off. Let's look what the other side looks like. Oh my God, it looks like a rug. It looks like a fricking rug on the other side. So I'm kind of just doing like little spurts as I go just to kind of tough in there. Okay, you guys, our outline is complete. I think I'm going to go ahead and also do this outline here so then we can fill all of the section in with white and then move on to the yellow. Now that your outline is complete, of course you're going to want to go back and fill it in with color. This is the fun part. I personally think all you have to do is a bunch of vertical lines. I find this is the easiest method and from all the videos that I've watched from rug tufters, they all seem to do vertical lines which just fills it in a lot quicker. I added all the white sections. There is going to be one more right here which I probably am going to add as well but I just want to see what this looks like and if we have the look. Oh my gosh, that looks incredible. That literally looks perfect. It's so soft too. Okay, I'm not going to lie. This actually looks like pretty good. I feel like this looks amazing so far. I am obsessed with it. I definitely do need to go in there and trim off some of those like kind of unlevel sections. However, it's looking great. I'm going to go now in with the white section for the little highlight and then we're going to add the yellow which I think we'll finish it off and add just a little bit of brightness to the piece and then we can see what it looks like in the end. Just to give you guys an idea of how much yarn I used, I only used two skeins and I still have this much left of either of them. So I mean, I only probably used three quarters of each skein for the full white section of this piece. I am so in love with this freaking little egg rug. This is so cute, you guys. It turned out amazing. I'm sure right around these edges here, I probably could have done it a little bit cleaner. I do also need to go back in and kind of trim some of these sections and you also want to make sure not to pull anything because it's very delicate at the moment. And then on the backside, which is right over here, we're actually going to want to go in and use some carpet adhesive to adhere all of these yarn sections together. That way the rug never comes untufted at all. But let me go ahead and trim the front side first. The yarn I'm actually using for this one is a little bit different. I'm going to be using wool yarn for this one. My other one was acrylic yarn. So this one is a little bit more expensive, but apparently it's supposed to be a little bit more dense and durable. So I have these blue yarn balls, which are so pretty, like a soft Tiffany blue. And then the white one's really fun because this is actually a wool yarn as well, but it has a little strand of like reflection in there. So you get this iridescent look, which I thought would be perfect for our clouds. I just finished off the white for the circular cloud rug and I'm about to flip it over and look at the clouds. Oh, these just look so cute. I did not know this was so simple, you guys. I am fully obsessed with this. It is so much fun, but the blue is totally going to make these clouds pop. So I want to go ahead and start adding the blue, the same exact process as last time, but we're doing that nice little Tiffany blue color, which is going to fill in all of our blank space and we're going to outline our circle as well. And we will be good to go with this rug. The cloud rug is complete, you guys. I whipped through this one. I think I probably finished this in around an hour, which I think is pretty quick. This is actually a very substantial size as well, probably about almost two feet in diameter. But let me go ahead and check the other side. I haven't even looked yet myself. Oh my gosh, it is literally so cute. You could see a little bit of the shimmer and the white there and then the blue is so pretty. I do have to go in there and of course, trim all those excess threads that are kind of hanging off. Also another tip that I saw a lot of people using when trimming their rugs was actually shears for sheep, like wool shears, and then they also used hair trimmer. So I don't have either of those. I'm just going to go through and use my scissors for now. But if you guys want to see another video on rug tufting, maybe like a larger scale project or something more advanced or super intricate, totally let me know in the comments section below and I can make sure to invest in a couple more tools. So we can just kind of test them out and see how they were. But I'm going to go ahead and for both these rugs, I'm going to slap the carpet adhesive on the bottom of them or the backside. Let them dry overnight and I'm going to catch you guys back here in the morning. So we could check out the rugs and see how they look. But let's go ahead and apply the adhesive on them. Now when it comes to the adhesive, I went ahead and I purchased this one at Lowe's. It is just an indoor outdoor carpet adhesive and I used an old dollar store brush to apply it on the backside. Now I've seen a lot of people use like, spackling spatulas which seem to work a little bit better. You just have to be a little bit gentle when applying this because you're not going to want to pull out any of that yarn. But I did give a generous coat of this glue on the backside which then you're going to go ahead and allow to dry overnight. I used canvas just to back it. Now I know a lot of people don't back it with anything but I figured I would just try out and back this piece in particular with some extra canvas that I had on hand. So I smoothed that out on the backside, let it dry overnight and then we can go ahead and finish it off in the morning. Good morning guys, it's the next morning and my rugs have been drying overnight and I am ready to go ahead and finish them off. I'm going to do a nice little finished edge on them to make them look nice and neat. Share with you guys the entire process of that and then we can style them up. But rug tufting, wow. I'm going to also come in a little bit later after I finish up the rugs and kind of talk about what my thoughts were, tips or tricks or anything that I learned along the way. So let's go ahead and finish them off to start. There are a whole bunch of methods on how to properly finish off a rug. So I kind of just put a couple of them together and kind of just created my own finishing method. So the first thing that I did was I just went ahead and removed all of the excess canvas just around where we glued it on at. And then I went ahead and I cut out the piece from the frame itself, leaving about a one and a half inch strip of burlap all the way around my circular shape or whatever shape you're going to be going for because we're actually going to want to then go ahead and cut this kind of around so it's nice and easily foldable and we are going to be hot gluing it down to the backside there. Now traditionally you would hot glue this down and then you would apply some twill tape on top. However, I just didn't have any twill tape on hand so I just simply went ahead and adhered this down around the entire rim on the backside of the rug and that is how you finish off your rug and complete it. I'm entirely sure what I'm going to use these for. They were more so practice projects just to see kind of like how I was able to use the rug tufting gun since I've never used one in my life before but it was honestly very, very simple. I thought the process was going to be a lot harder than it looked. When I received the gun in the mail I was looking at it and I was like okay, what button does what or where do I need to put the yarn or is there things I need to add to this machine? Like it actually ended up being a very simple process of just stringing the yarn right into the machine and getting started. So that is exactly what I did and I kind of wanted to share with you guys some of my takeaways from rug tufting that I think you guys should maybe also consider if you're going to be doing so. The first one being the material that I used for the actual base of the rug. I found that the burlap material was so much better than the monks cloth. I did a little bit of a test run on the monks cloth. The monks cloth just seemed to be a little bit too tightly woven to where it was very hard to get your tufting needle like at the end of the gun into the actual fabric and when you would go it would kind of skip some sections all around. I just found the burlap to be a lot nicer. It's a lot more looser. It is much more cost effective than the monks cloth. I do believe the monks cloth was $15 a yard whereas the burlap was $2.99. So it's a fraction of the price and it worked really, really great for the backing of the rug. Now in terms of the yarn for the egg project I used the acrylic yarn and for the cloud project I used the wool yarn. Now I definitely do think the wool yarn just feels thicker. Like this rug all around, when you step on it it feels a lot more squishier, a lot more cushionier whereas the egg rug does feel a little bit lighter. It almost feels like it's not as dense as the wool rug. So that is something to keep in mind and I do know based off a couple videos that I watched that the acrylic just doesn't stand up as well as the wool yarn does. And it kind of goes acrylic first then cotton and then wool. So if you're wanting to keep that in mind when you're also picking out your yarns that is a great thing to also consider. I ended up using the carpet adhesive just from the local hardware store on the backside using some canvas on there. Folding it over and finishing off the rug and I just love the way that these projects turned out. They're definitely like quirky and fun. I don't exactly know where I'm going to be using them throughout my apartment but I really wanna know if you guys like to see a video of me creating an actual rug like something larger scale or if something a little bit more aesthetically pleasing for my space. Something that I would definitely be using, you know in my living room or in my bedroom. So let me know if that's something you guys would like to see. And last but not least, you guys do not forget to check out today's video sponsor Ritual. I'm going to link them at the top of the description box below and you can go ahead and get 10% off of your subscription which is absolutely incredible. So definitely take advantage of that and I will catch all of you guys in my next one. If you have done any rug-topping projects as well please feel free to send them to me over on Instagram. I would love to know. Or if you guys have any pointers, tips or tricks comment them below. I would love to know anything. I think this is going to be a new hobby of mine. Very, very excited to continue making these little rug projects and I will catch you all in my next video. Bye guys.