How to Cut a Rug Off of a Frame Loom

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Debbie the roboteir and I'm here for expert village. We're making a rag rug on a hand made loom, and this is what they do over in Navajo land. This is a really old rug and it's great. You can see that it's got nice margins; it's thinner material and at the end, what they did was they took the warp, which is a little smaller and they cut it and tied knots inn a few. And they get a little fringe like that. So when you go to finish this rug, what you want to do is, if you're a real fanatic about having nice edges you're going to take a needle and thread and stitch around the edges just to make sure they're going to stay in place. But you really don't have to do that. But what you do have to do is come down here to the loops and cut each loop so that you have these pieces hanging off. And on this end, you just untie it. And what you do is you take two or four groups of these and you tie them in a knot. That way the rags won't come off the ends. And you can trim this one, and then fold it back and you can trim the other ones on the other end....these hairy ends... short enough so that it looks like the same thing. The Navajo don't really worry about that. And these ones that go over windows, they actually have, on the top...they've stitched the top so that you can hang it up and the bottom has the fringe on it. But for the most part, it's good to have fringes on both ends if you're going to think about having it on the floor. If you want to use it for a window cover, don't worry about it, just stitch the top. I hope you had fun."