Tufting 101 - The Basics

About Tufting Guns...

There are two types of tufting guns. Electric one or pneumatic one.

The electric one would be perfect to use it at home, you don't need a compressor. The electric guns are low pile machines, which means the pile height is only up to 18mm. For example AK-I (cut pile), AK-II (loop pile), and ZQ-II (cut and loop).

The pneumatic guns allow you to make high pile rugs up to 60mm, depends on which gun you have. The AK-III can work between 18mm-60mm.

Cut pile or Loop pile ?

Cut pile tufting machines automatically cut the yarn at the end of each rotation, this leaves you with a "shag" like texture. 

Loop pile tufting machines punch the yarn through the primary tufting cloth in one continues cycle, giving you a more "nubbly" texture. Additionally you need to cut the yarn when you are ready to remove the gun from the cloth. 

About Tufting cloth...

We recommend you to use the primary tufting cloth as the background of a rug. It allows you to have mistakes and is composed of quality fabric and durable for long term use. The yellow weft yarn insertion with 5 cm intervals helps you stretch your cloth properly and keep your design in place.

About yarn, what kind of?

Depends of what kind of rug you want to make, you might choose different kind of yarn.

Acrylic yarn is cheap and feels super soft. You could start as a beginner, try all the techniques and don't waste too much money. The only thing is, cheep acrylic yarn wears off really fast and the rug will have a fuzzy layer on top. So make sure to buy decent acrylic yarn.

Cotton yarn is only suitable for wallhanging pieces, they are too delicate to be used on the floor. A rug made of cotton yarn won't last long.

Wool yarn is the perfect option for both rug and wallhanging pieces. They are a bit harder than acrylic yarn but definitely more resistant and environment-friendly. That's why we choosed wool yarn for our shop.

Our Yarn is 3/27 DC (837/3 Tex ) 100 % New Zealand Wool yarn. You should run it with double strands at once or use it single with much tighter lines. Multiple yarns can also be put through the gun to create a thicker pile. That means if you are using thiner yarn, just put through more strands that the white cloth won't been seen.

How much yarn do I need ?

Based on how tight your lines are and how much yarn you cut off, it varies of the amount of yarn you are using. Generally speaking you'll use 200g yarn per square foot (30cm x 30cm). This is for the cut pile machine (AK-1) with a pile height of approximately 12mm tall. But it's always good to have more yarn with you as backup! 

How to glue the back?

Using PVC Carpet adhesive will be a good option to fix the yarn. You can get them at a local hardware store. You will need around 0,5 kg for a rug like 60cmx40cm. Trying different kind out and you will find what you like the most.

How to finish? 

After the adhesive dry out you can cut the rug out and fold the edges as for example the waterfall edge. You can stick the backing material you want on the backside of the rug. You could use spray adhesive or any other latex adhesive or even carpet adhesive. It all depends what kind of material you choose. And the end cover the edges with twill tape will make everything looking really clean and neat.

How to trim?

You could trim with a hair clipper, scissors or even sheep shear. I was using a hair clipper to trim. That worked actually just fine until I saw people using sheep shear. It's a great tool, you can trim so much faster and for a big rug that would be super efficient. Also it can correct the too tight lines that you did while tufting. That part tent to be higher than everywhere else, with sheep shear you can even that out easily. At the end do some final control cutting and correct the edges.
A strong powered vacuum machine is needed to clean up all the micro yarn.

Ps: These are only suggestions based on our experience. There might be many other solutions out there that could work perfectly. We encourage you to test your own :)