The Hobby Blog #1 - Latch Hooking

I’ve never really been a crafts person. To me, crafts are a form of creative expression that requires a certain level of precision and skill - I’ve never been able to find joy in a janky scarf in the same way I can with an experimental painting or drawing that comes out a bit shit. While I try to adopt a growth mindset in all aspects of my life, my easily distractible brain doesn’t want to put in the necessary hours to improve my skills and so I become pretty dispirited and uninterested in whatever I'm working on straight away.

It’s a mystery then why I become so obsessed with trying out latch hooking, a form of rug making which uses a hinged hook to form a knotted pile from short, pre-cut pieces of yarn. I saw an ad for a pre-made kit on Instagram and after several days where I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I put in an order on Craft Club Co, a Sydney-based independent craft company, for a pink and white daisy rug kit.

In the kit, you are provided with a rug canvas with the design printed on it, pre-cut yarn in the correct colours for your design (you’re provided plenty extra yarn in the case of mistakes), a latch hook tool, detailed instructions including a QR code for a Youtube guide and cute sticker. While the $86 price is a steep entry point in a hobby, I felt it was excellent value for money.

To make the rug you use the latch hook to create knots in the canvas with the yarn. It’s very easy to get the hang of the knot-making technique, and once you learn it, you just repeat the same action over and over until the rug is complete - that’s all there is to it. As a result, it’s much easier than knitting or crochet. It is time-consuming though - I’d estimate it took me about 40 hours over a couple of months to create the 48cm x 48cm rug (though browsing the Instagram tag I found out some other people completed theirs in a week - so maybe I’m exceptionally slow).

It’s very meditative working on the rug. The repetitive action is soothing and a good way to calm your body down from an anxious state. In addition, it’s fairly mindless which makes it the perfect co-activity for listening to podcasts or audiobooks, or watching a sitcom or light entertainment (many, many episodes of Seinfeld went into this creation). Once I’d finished the rug, I found I missed it as a wind-down activity before bed.

Having said that, the things that make it comforting are also what makes it limiting. It’s essentially the same action repeated over and over, and while that’s soothing it didn’t really scratch my itch for creative expression. Unlike knitting or embroidery where you might choose different stitches or colours for different purposes, there’s only really one way to complete this latch hook kit. Additionally, while I loved the different rug patterns available for purchase (particularly the one I ended up buying), I felt somewhat hemmed in by the choices available. However, it’s entirely possible to create your own rug design and buy pre-cut yarn in the colours you want. Maybe that’s what I’ll try next.

At the end of the day, the thing that made me happiest was tracking my progress and working towards the completion of the rug, and getting more and more excited as I got closer to finishing it. And when I had finished, I had a very cute lil rug. It’s going on the wall though - I worked too hard to have anyone’s dirty feet trampling all over it.

Try it yourself!

I used the FLOWER BOMB - DAISY Rug Making Kit from Craft Club Co to make my rug. It cost $86 with shipping costs of $10 to New Zealand. The kit contains everything you need to make a rug, and there a range of different cute designs to choose from. I also ordered trimming scissors for an extra $13 but they aren’t essential to creating the rug. The company also has bag-making kits using the latch-hooking technique as well as embroidery and cross-stich kits.

The Ribbon Rose specialty craft store sells a range of latch hooking kits in a range of designs at different price points ($20 - $300). They also sell plain canvases and pre-cut yarn in different colours if you want to design your own rug.

If you want to try latch hooking without investing a significant amount of money, K-Mart sells latch hook bag-making kits for for $7 each.