Macramé Wall Hanging

Have you noticed that all of the crafting sites are showcasing beautiful macramé wall hangings?  It seems to be the latest trend in vintage revival, so I thought I would make one!

This project is definitely Hippie Chick worthy, so I put some Young Living Patchouli, Frankincense, and Lavender essential oils in my Teardrop Diffuser, cued up some Bossa gypsy guitar music to set the mood, and got busy tying!

I spent hours on Pinterest and Etsy trying to come up with the perfect project, and found a lot of resources showing how to tie the various knots, and how long to cut your string (8 times the finished length), but not much in the way of actual patterns.  I did find this eyelet pattern on a page demonstrating various knot tying, and knew right away that I had to use this in my design.

The first step for me was deciding where I was going to hang my new creation.  I have a lovely spot in my yard, where I thought a macramé art piece would look great, so I measured the height of the area.  The area I wanted to fill was approximately one meter in height (three feet-ish), so the total length of the rope needed to be 8 times the total height: 3 x 8= 24, so, I would need 24 foot lengths.

I thought this was going to be really expensive, but I found some cotton laundry line in my local hardware store, and since it came in 100 foot length packages, I purchased four of them.  Each of the 100 foot packages could be cut into 4 lengths of 25 feet. Perfect!

As you can see in the photo, four pieces of rope from each of the four packages gave me 16 pieces.

I wrapped each of the 16 lengths of rope over my branch using a larks head knot giving me 32 lengths of rope to create with! A larks head knot is very simple, but you do have to pay attention to the direction you tie this knot, because it is easy to get it on backwards. This isn’t a big problem if you catch it right away, simply untie and retie.

So, with my stick secured in the slats of my dinning room chairs, I thought I was ready to start creating, but not yet!  After attempting to tie just one knot, I realized that the length of my ropes was going to be problematic, so I bundled each rope up and secured it with an elastic leaving 4-5 foot lengths instead of 12 foot lengths.

I had a volunteer branch that had fallen from my tree a couple of months ago, and because it is not straight, I needed something to fill in the design at the highest point.

I wanted to tuck one of the eyelet knot patterns into the high portion of my branch, and the pattern used ten strands of cord.  I didn’t want the pattern to be right on the edge, so I pulled four cords off to the right side, counted out my ten cords, and then pulled the remaining cords off to the left side.

I discovered that using just the ten cords that I isolated, would not  produce the results that I was after, so I off-set the first double half hitch knot using cords 4 & 5 rather than cords 5&6. I probably would have been fine, but I found this more aesthetically pleasing.   

I tied down to the half way point in the eyelet pattern, and secured it with a square knot on each side. Well, truth be told, I first finished the eyelet pattern, and noticed how the cord to each side was just hanging, and it looked off, especially after I started adding more square knots.  So I ripped it back!  I did a lot of that.

Hubby likes to tease that knitting is knit one, purl two, rip back three rows. I guess that's true with macramé too. <sigh >

I finished the eyelet pattern, and soon realized that I would  need some way to keep my stitches in line, so I placed my cutting mat under the project, lining up my square knots up with the one inch grid on the mat.   

There are so many examples of macramé wall hangings on the internet, I had a difficult time choosing a design to replicate. I wanted to keep this project relatively simple, since it was the first time I’ve done macramé since grade school.  At the same time I wanted to have something impressive after my labours. I came up with this very basic design as I was going along, and with a fair amount of ripping back, but here it is.  Other than the eyelet pattern, this is just square knots. That’s it.

I tied a few knots in the fringe for interest. To finish of the ends, I straightened up the fringe, and used my rotary cutting wheel and cutting guide to created a nice neat “V”.

Et Voila! 
I didn’t end up hanging this in the backyard where I had originally intended, but chose to hang it on the front porch where visitors could see it.  I love it!