by Rosa Cartagena
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"Continuing to push boundaries, Wood is on the cutting edge of craft arts, which fine art institutions have only recently embraced. Tufting, an intensive process of rug making, has skyrocketed in popularity in the last five years, thanks to Philly artists Tim Eads and Tiernan Alexander, who founded the teaching and supplies company Tuft the World. (It’s also a huge TikTok trend.) Wood began experimenting with the fluffy medium during pandemic lockdown and last year she was on the jury of Tuft the World’s TuftCon.
“Qualeasha is carving her own path, [taking] this 100-year-old craft and really doing something with it that has never been done before,” said Eads."
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Have you heard of rug tufting? It’s the newest crafting craze taking over social media.
Tufting is the way soft, fluffy rugs are often made and you can learn to make your own at a workshop in South Philly. PHL17’s Alex Butler went to “Tuft The World” to check it out.
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The software generates many versions of what it thinks Eads is asking for. He chose one of DALL-E’s images, a squared spiral in black. Its imperfectly aligned lines create a slightly dizzying effect.
]]>The Paradigm Gallery in Old City features rugs fabricated by Tuft the World, but designed by a robot.
The Paradigm Gallery in Old City is exhibiting rugs designed by artificial intelligence.
The rugs, presented as works of art, are attributed to the rug tufting company Tuft the World. Its co-founder, artist Tim Eads, is not entirely comfortable calling them his own.
“This is not really my work,” he said. “I basically curate.”
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]]>New to this year is the MNYK Artbox, which will feature interactive art demos and performances all summer long. Week three on June 15 is Artbox Demo: Tuft the World.
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]]>FOX 29's Sue Seiro chats with Tim Eads, an artist at Tuft the World, about rug tufting.
See full video here.
]]>Rug crafting company’s commitment to sustainability inspires foray into making recycled shipping supplies.
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]]>A West Philly company has set out to prove that art is all around us — even underfoot. Tuft the World is a textiles supplier that helped launch the trend of rug tufting, which refers to making a rug with a "gun" that punches yarn through a backing material in the form of a loop.
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]]>Soon after my partner and I started our rug-tufting supplies business in 2018, I realized the huge amount of waste we were producing. And it bothered me—a ton.
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]]>Tim Eads and Tiernan Alexander didn't set out to fall in love with tufting. Five years ago, the Texas-born, Philly-based husband and wife duo were doing their usual creative work—making ceramic pieces and fiber art, plus running a screen-printing and cut-and-sew tote bag business.
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]]>The first-ever tufting convention, or TuftCon, is happening this weekend in Philadelphia.
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]]>Tufting rose in popularity during the height of the pandemic. Now, Philly’s TuftCon will celebrate the craft in person.
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]]>TuftCon comes to Philly, bringing together tufting aficionados from around the country.
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]]>Rug tufting is one of the crafts that has rapidly gone from super niche to super trendy in recent years and rug TikTok has been booming since 2020.
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]]>Next on You Oughta Know, find out how SW Philly’s Tuft the World turned a rug-making tool into big business.
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]]>In this hands-on instructional class, participants will learn to use power tufting machines to create a rug or wall hanging. The 5-hour class will cover the basics of setting up a tufting frame with stretched primary cloth and threading and operating tufting machines. Instructions for how to cut, glue, and finish a tufted piece will also be provided.
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]]>If you’ve done a lot of your holiday shopping online, you may feel a little guilty about all the plastic, bubble wrap, packing peanuts, and cardboard packing your purchases. The good news is, there’s a small business in Philadelphia trying to solve the problem of packaging waste.
“Best case, you put it in recycling. Worst case, it just goes in the garbage,” said Tiernan Alexander, co-owner of Tuft the World, a small craft supply company based in Southwest Philly. “So we’ve been always looking for solutions.”
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]]>As mentioned on their website: “We believe in people, community, and the health of our planet over profit”. They are adamant about sticking to their mission to make the craft of tufting accessible to a broad audience, while staying true to their values of equity and sustainability. Tuft the World’s business model aims to solve multiple of the UN SDGs, specifically SDG 8 and SDG 12.
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While some credit the inundation of shaggy, graphic rugs to the popularity of the oddly satisfying TikTok videos that document their creation, rug tufting is by no means a new process—after all, humans have been making rugs since the fourth century B.C. While colorful yarn being shot into fabric at high speeds is certainly captivating to watch, the reason behind the resurgence is more about access than aesthetics. Only recently could consumers to get ahold of a common carpet-industry tool: the handheld electric tufting machine (otherwise known as the tufting gun). For that, you can thank Philadelphia-based artist and educator Tim Eads.
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]]>Tuft the World is a Philly-based company that uses sustainable materials to sell supplies to make hand tufted rugs. Founder Tim Eads has been a “tinkerer” his whole life and said he came to the fair to show off the machine the company uses for rug making. A consistent crowd of attendees watched Eads and his partners demonstrate the tool, which created tufts of yarn on the piece of fabric.
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]]>The only reason I even know what a tufting gun looks like is because Kristina Panos wrote up a post about the terrifying looking things earlier in the year. Later we talked about them on the podcast, and I seem to recall saying they looked like some cobbled together weapon from a horror film.
Anyway, while Hackaday taught me what these things looked like and what the did, it wasn’t until I walked through the 2022 Philly Maker Faire that I actually saw one being used and examples of what they are capable of thanks to the folks from Tuft the World.
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Tuft the World is an online shop largely responsible for the boom in custom tufted rugs over the last few years. Along with their top-selling items—rug tufting machines—they offer a full line of sustainable and recycled yarn in their Reflect Yarn Co. line. Not only do they sell the tools and materials needed to create tufted rugs, they facilitate an active online community of tufting artists, hobbyists, and enthusiasts.
After a full discovery phase, we created a logo suite that reflects the spirit of the tufting community and can be used in endless applications. The process of tufting was an underlying inspiration for the brand—from the custom, wavy typemark, to the repeating name pattern and grid graphic. A vibrant color palette was influenced directly from the yarn colors within the Reflect line, while the logo badges represent the wide variety of rug shapes. Hand-drawn doodles and annotations take inspiration from the creative process itself, as many rug tufters tend to be multidisciplinary artists.
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]]>We take to the streets of palm springs to ask what the people want to see in a queen of hearts room and expected the answers with a combo of perverted, interesting, and a man dressed as a banana….. The majority voted for a heart-shaped mirror above the bed to fit the theme. For the mirror idea, we get to visit Tim Ead of Tims’s Tufing projects who creates tufted garments, I’ve never heard of tufting. He teaches Trixie and special guest Nicole Byer this unique technique and I have to say it looks very relaxing and the finished result is gorgeous, a mix of 60’s color pallets in the shape of…you guessed it a heart!
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]]>For the second room of the Trixie Motel went went full force with the theme of "Love" and had a lot of loving helpful hands bring this space to life.
My love of murals of course had to be featured once again but this time we got some extra help from our dear friends Nicholas Scheppard and Jenson Titus who make up the very talented duo known as Very Gay Paint who are not only amazing mural artists but also insanely talented comedians. We also had our good friends over at Mojo Glassworks step in again to create the colorful heart stained glass piece that you see in the bathroom.
Another amazing piece of this room is the original framed artwork by the fabulous drag queen and graphic designer Chorizo May who created art for each room in the motel (so be sure to keep your eye out for it!)
The focal point of this room has to be the hand tufted heart mirror by Tim Eads of Tuft The World that is hanging over the custom heart bed. It brings such a fun element to the room and I am sure it will be a favorite of any guests who stay here.
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]]>In COVER 66, Editor Lucy Upward takes a look at the trend for tufted homewares and art and speaks to four dedicated tufters about the joys of the craft. Many of the new tufters we can see online are followers and clients of artist and Tuft the World founder Tim Eads, who has earned himself the name ‘King Tuft’. Driven by a desire to share his knowledge and offer better accessibility to tufting materials, Eads set up his Tuft the World business and regularly shares tips and demos online on the company website and on platforms such as TikTok. Here he speaks to Lucy Upward about his discovery of tufting and the craft’s meteoric rise in popularity during the pandemic.
What inspired you to take your artwork into the realm of tufting? I’ve been around textile arts all my life. My family raised angora goats for mohair, my mom is an avid quilter, and I’ve worked in fibre arts since I moved to Philadelphia in 2009. That’s when I started working at The Fabric Workshop and Museum as a Project Manager helping other artists realise their artistic projects using sewing, felting, hair braiding, screen printing, and many other material processes.
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]]>Watch the episode here.
TikTok here
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[excerpt]
Most of the TikTok tufters find their equipment and materials through Tim Eads, an artist based in Philadelphia. He, too, was fascinated with the technique when he first encountered it a few years ago, and also experienced a crush of engagement with the Instagram videos he posted of him using it. “I had been running this canvas-bag business for years, and I had never seen this rabid curiousness before,” he says. But instead of just focusing on making videos of his own work, Eads was more interested in making this means of production more accessible. He founded an online community for tufters in 2018, and steadily began selling tufting guns and yarns, and posting YouTube videos on how to use and fix the tools. “I’ve always been someone who thinks that trade secrets as an artist is BS,” Eads says.
Tufting, in many ways, represents a union of many of the different types of artwork that Eads has done over the decades. He grew up on an Angora goat farm in West Texas, and his parents made mohair fibers. He studied graphic design as an undergraduate and was a screen printer for decades. After earning an MFA in ceramics at Cranbrook, he went to Philadelphia for a job at the Fabric Workshop, which he held for six years. Eads’s rugs usually feature geometric patterns — often with a dimensional effect — and vibrant colors. Right now he’s working on a series of rugs based on the shapes of gerrymandered congressional districts.
His business had been growing steadily — he’s pretty much got the monopoly on tufting guns and supplies and has accessible lessons online — but since COVID hit, it’s gone gangbusters. He’s receiving six times the number of orders now that he did in February and has customers in 120 different countries. Eads sees a future in which tufting will lose its novelty, but not its appeal. “Like any art technique, it will become common knowledge, and people will learn about it in school,” he says. “It will be like, Oh, yeah, people know how to tuft now.”
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