Why is Instagram hooked on rug-making?

When Rosa Nguyen Chau isn't studying, she's making rugs — although really, she admits, even when she's hitting the books, she has tufting on the brain. "Tufting" would be something of a catch-all term for this Vancouver-based nursing student's favourite hobby: threading wool through fabric to produce mats of any design. 

There are a few different methods for producing such a thing. Crafters with an especially chill demeanour might opt for rug-hooking, an old-school technique involving scraps of yarn that are woven through a sheet of cloth, piece by piece. (The process does, in fact, require a literal hook.) 

There's also something known as punch needle, so called for the tool you need to do it. That was Nguyen Chau's gateway to textile art last spring. It's quicker than Option A, but still requires the crafter to repeatedly stab their canvas by hand — a satisfying activity, one imagines, but still taxing on the wrists. 

A third route involves the use of tufting gun, a hand-held industrial power tool that's become the weapon of choice for internet-famous creators. It's capable of producing custom carpets at a dizzying speed. Depending on the model, it might fire off 43 stitches per second — and Nguyen Chau recently acquired one of these toys, with which she makes squishy mirror frames and plush purses and supersized versions of Chinatown sweets (Hi-Chew, Pocky, White Rabbit candies). 

"In the evening — up until 2 a.m., 3 a.m. — I'll just be tufting, going at it," she says. She produces so much, in fact, that she sells her creations so that she can make room for more. Vancouver's Slice of Life gallery carries them, as does a local boutique (Picnics and Poetry). And even though her audience on Instagram is still quite small, hovering below 1,000 faithful, she also finds buyers on the platform — which is perhaps unsurprising considering her preferred puffy aesthetic has seemingly exploded there during lockdown.

Wool you look at what's happening online ...

When Nguyen Chau posts pictures of her latest creations, the hashtags she includes reveal the mainstream demand for mat-based content: #rugmaking (35,500+ results), #tufting (82,000+ results), #tufted (82,800+ results). Beyond social media, she participates in an online forum for rug-makers, Tuft the World. That community has its own curatorial Instagram account, which boasts more than 51,000 followers, and beyond connecting like-minded makers, Tuft the World also runs an online store that sells the requisite supplies for beginners. Starter kits (which include frame, tufting machine and cloth) go for $365 US. 

Rug-making is possibly even bigger on TikTok, where posts tagged #tufting have snagged more than 307 million views as of writing. A more video-forward medium, those items usually capture the rat-a-tat fabrication process, the satisfying experience of watching something materialize out of nothing — though the something often falls within certain day-glo subject categories: anime, The Simpsons, hypebeast-friendly shoes, Y2K-inspired psychedelia, corporate logos … and a startling amount of fried eggs.

Who's doing it?

Like Nguyen Chau, many of these creators are just rug-making to fill their interminable lockdown weekends. Maybe they saw a Reel of someone tufting a toadstool and impulse-ordered supplies off Amazon, hoping yarn, sweat and tears would be enough to pass the time. Rugs are one more pandemic hobby, no different from baking sourdough bread or learning to trim your own bangs. 

For others, though, it's become a surprise source of income — a job in a time when such things are scarce. 

'It's a hobby that quickly turned into a full-time gig'

In Toronto, Laura Cone says she was freshly graduated from OCAD U when the pandemic arrived. "I was stuck inside and I needed something that was relatively clean and quiet to do." Simply put: "I was bored," she laughs. But Cone had been scrolling through reams of textile art on Instagram, and it seemed like the ticket for her. 

Cone got started in the spring of 2020. She ordered herself a punch needle and learned the basics through online tutorials. The process is not as breezy as social media makes it seem, she says. Still, she'd produced her first rug in three days. By October, she was posting her work on Instagram: droopy cartoon characters with superfluous eyeballs and an open-mouthed expression suggesting a permanent case of the quarantine blahs. "They kind of fit my general outlook on what was going on with COVID at the beginning," she says. "They kind of carry a mood." 

Today, she has more than 22,000 followers, some of whom are paying customers. And to meet demand, she bought herself a tufting gun. "Something that would take me three days takes me half an hour now," she says. "I'm super busy and I don't really have time for much else. It's a hobby that quickly turned into a full-time gig." 

Hanna Eidson in Dartmouth, N.S., has a similar story. She'd been working as a bartender when the first lockdown put her out of a job. "I got a CERB cheque and immediately got a bunch of tufting supplies," she says. Eidson also launched an Instagram account, @h.h.hooks, which has drawn 40,000 followers so far. It's largely populated with photos of cheerful fruits and candies, tufted treats that she sells online. 

"It's my full-time job now. It feels crazy even saying it, but I was able to quit my serving job in September," she says. "I'm certainly not getting rich from it," she explains, but in the Before Times, she couldn't have imagined such a thing. "I was working at a restaurant and doing art in all my free time, but I never really thought that I could sell it."

Unlike Eidson, Victoria Brumwell was already in business for herself when she first picked up a tufting gun. A multidisciplinary artist based in Halifax, Brumwell launched her brand, Little Brummie, in 2018, and it specializes in handmade housewares: printed tea towels and throw pillows and the like. When she first began tufting in 2020, she approached it as a new addition to her skill set, but audience appetite for all things rug has prompted some changes to her product line. Her usual screen-printed offerings have been put on pause while Brumwell cranks out more of the plush stuff: fried-egg coasters and monstera wall hangings and, one of her favourite items, multicolour "slug rugs." 

"I didn't get into it because it was trendy," says Brumwell of tufting, "but because the demand is there now, it's what I end up making." And she says she's in non-stop make mode, filling orders for her online shop and stockists such as Simon's. (The department store began carrying her rugs and prints six months ago.) "I treat it like a nine-to-five job," says Brumwell. "I never don't have work to do."

She's also seizing this woolly moment by pursuing collaborations with other artists, including Halifax cartoonist Mollie Cronin (a.k.a. Art Brat Comics). A limited series of rugs based on one of Cronin's illustrations dropped in late April and is already sold out. And beyond sales, the public demand for textile work has opened new opportunities, it seems. Cone, for example, says she's drawn interest from curators, and has been approached by galleries interested in showing her rugs.

Why's everyone hooked?

As for the reason behind the surge of online interest, the answer remains as fuzzy as the artform. Rug-making isn't new, and the tools aren't either. (Versions of the tufting machine have existed since the '30s, though it wasn't always as easy as placing an Etsy order to acquire one.) And even in the strange and narrow context of social-media trends, rug-makers have been using Instagram to show off their yarn-paintings for years now. Cone, for example, is a dedicated follower of Hannah Epstein, a Canadian artist whose practice has focused on hand-hooked rugs since 2010.

Epstein's work, which has appeared at the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Rooms, regularly references memes and pop culture, though the imagery is usually too unhinged to be mistaken for some emoji design blowing up rug TikTok. Nor does she produce her works for the sake of creating "oddly satisfying" content. There's an interesting topsy-turvy paradigm that Epstein's playing with in a lot of her pieces: she serves up digital culture, stuff that's created and consumed instantaneously, but she renders it in the style of an overlooked feminine folk art — and at a scale that requires an enormous outpouring of time and hand-wrought labour. 

Unsurprisingly, she's been following rug-makers on Instagram with interest, especially when she discovers an artist who's pushing the potential of the form. (For reference: these cats/dining chairs by Selby Hurst Inglefield are among her faves.) "I'm OK with watching everyone get into it," she says. "I just fear being lumped in with it [the trend]. And so that's pushed me to develop my practice further." Her recent work, she says, is increasingly mixing textiles with video and audio components, and she's moving away from the cartoon-inspired style that's typified so much of her output. 

Still, as an observer, she has some theories as to why the public's so keen on rug-making, both as a hobby and an aesthetic. She can't help but think of the artform's roots. It's a domestic handicraft, something done exclusively by women whose lives were relegated to the home. If their resources were limited, making a rug was an essential skill, a means of furnishing the household. But in the right hands, it was a creative outlet too, and one of few opportunities for personal expression. Epstein draws a connection to the quarantine lifestyle, where we're all eager to decorate the "temporary prison cells" we call home. 

Brumwell and Cone have similar nesting theories about rug-making's rise. Rugs can be practical — or at the very least "usable," says Cone. "People are investing in their homes because of COVID, and are working from home. Maybe there's some sort of appeal to having functional art." Adds Brumwell: "They want to make their homes as comfortable and personal as possible. The soft, tactile nature of the tufted objects are comforting to people."

"I love that I can reach out and touch my art. I can have my art sitting on my couch and play with it," says Eidson.

"Maybe in the pandemic people just want to be able to reach out and touch — touch things in the world, when we're not really able to."