Artist Fritz Haeg on How to Make a Rug from Materials in Your Home

As host of the PBS digital series The Art Assignment, curator Sarah Urist Green interviews artists about their practices, then presents us with original art lessons inspired by their work. Now, those lessons and fresh new ones are available in You Are an Artist, a book released earlier this month by Penguin Books. The volume is filled with over 50 art lessons that show you don’t need to be an artist to make creative work. In the following excerpt from You Are an Artist, discover the work of Fritz Haeg and his instructions on how to make a rug from recycled fabrics in your home.

Before Fritz Haeg decamped to a revived commune in Northern California, he lived in a geodesic dome on the east side of Los Angeles. The dome was Haeg’s home and also his place of work, where he welcomed artists and community members for workshops and events, involving collective movement exercises, book discussions, lessons in radical gardening, and much else. It was here that Haeg evolved his technique of hand-knotting strips of old T-shirts and bedsheets into giant, colorful rugs. On his own or with the help of many, rug making is just one aspect of Haeg’s abiding interest in how we live and make a home, which he explores not only in his own domestic spaces, but also in the notoriously cold, formal spaces of art museums.

Haeg honed this method over time, scavenging old textiles and experimenting with crocheting, knitting, and making clothing. He put his hand-knotting technique to use for his series “Domestic Integrities,” which began with the creation of two rugs, spirally stitched by volunteers and collaborators who added local textiles to the rugs as they traveled from city to city. Inside museums, the rugs became what Haeg calls “Domestic Integrity Fields,” or sites for the presentation of goods and materials gathered from nearby land and gardens. Local contributors brought bread, pickles, flowers, and homemade remedies to present atop the rug, and visitors were invited to take off their shoes and make themselves at home.

It is precisely this idea of making oneself at home that is at the core of this assignment. Making a rug can be either a communal activity, with materials and labor shared among a group, or a solo endeavor, added to as time allows and textiles accumulate. Your rug will be a field for activity, no matter how you put it to use. It will be not only a document of your past, made up of formerly loved T-shirts and fraying bedsheets, but also a site where new experiences unfold and new histories accumulate.

The rug that once graced Haeg’s geodesic dome has followed him to his new home several hundred miles north, where it warms a cabin floor.

Your turn

Have a stack of old clothes too worn or too beloved to give away? Make them into a rug. And don’t let a lack of crafting expertise stop you from giving this a try. It may seem awkward and lumpy at first, but as you add more stitches the rug relaxes and resolves into shape. You’ll get a feel for it as you go.

• Gather old textiles, such as T-shirts, sheets, towels, fabric scraps, anything.
• Cut the textiles into strips of relatively uniform width or density, tying them together to make longer segments.
• Using the technique below, make a rug.
• When your rug is finished, live on it and make it part of your story.

Make a rug technique

• Cut your available fabric into strips of approximately the same width and join them to create one very large strip.
• On one end, make a loop knot and pull it tight.
• Place your fingers through the loop and pull the longer piece of hanging fabric through it, just enough to make a new loop of the same size.
• Repeat this 4–5 times, casting on 4–5 stitches.
• Take your last loop back to the first one, grab on to both loops, and bring the hanging fabric strip through both of them together, pulling it through to make another loop.
• Cast on another stitch, as you did in step 3.

• Take that loop and join it onto your slowly forming circle, grabbing onto a previously made stitch and pulling your hanging fabric strip through both loops to form a new loop.
• Alternate casting on stitches separate from the rug with stitches joined to the closest loop on the outer edge of the circle.
• When your rug gets large enough, you can stop casting on stitches and join every new stitch you make to the outermost edge of the circle.
• Continue until you run out of fabric. Add on to it when you have more fabric.