New rug hooked footstool designs based on IKEA stool

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Hooking a footstool is easy. Getting the footstool body built and padded is the most common obstacle. And then you need to find the feet, and probably finish them. Don’t get me started on the stapling….. Don’t get me wrong, footstools are wonderful but there are a lot of steps. What if there was a way to completely remove the most difficult (and expensive) stuff?

Start with a premade stool from IKEA

I found this stool while shopping at an IKEA store. It was simple and I loved that I could buy it without a cover. On the website the stool is offered with a white cover. In the store you buy the cover separately . . . or not at all, which is what I did.

2015 Sauder Village Rug Camp

Because I am still tinkering with the room sized rug, I try to take smaller projects to rug camp. I found this footstool just a month before camp, so it was a natural choice. I remembered that I had a drawing that my youngest grandson drew many years ago of Jackson when he was a puppy. I started with that in the center and then hooked the flowers and goofy shapes on the edges free hand. As it turned out I did not even need the velcro on the bottom. I’ll talk about the finishing in another post. Let’s talk about how I got the project started.

Fast forward to 2016 Sauder Village Rug Camp

It is time again to choose a project for this year. I have a great coffee mug that I received one year for Mother’s Day from my youngest grandchild. We had just bought a broken down farm house about 7 miles outside the village of Pemberville. Nicky knew the house was important to me, so it became the subject of the gift mug.

This drawing would make another great footstool project. I use a program on my ipad called Graphic. It is hands down the best drawing app I’ve found. It has all the complexity of Adobe Illustrator, which is very expensive. In fact, I don’t think you can buy Illustrator anymore, you have to rent it month to month. Graphic is much more reasonable. I love it for drawing rug hooking patterns.

To get started be sure to watch the tutorials on Autodesk’s website.

I loaded a photo of the drawing into the app and traced the drawing on a new layer. Next I added a drawing of the outside of the footstool that I did for Jaksin. Then I began doodling ideas for the areas on the side of the pattern.

Once I had a design I thought would work, I printed it out full size, taped it together and because it is a 3-d design, I traced it onto muslin. I then draped that over the footstool to get a better idea of how the pattern will work. It didn’t work for me.

Back to the app. I adjusted the sizing, added and subtracted as needed. Printed it again, taped and traced and evaluated. This process got repeated at least 3 times, sometimes designs take many more depending on the design.

Designing a pattern is a LOT of work

Sounds time consuming? It is.

Over time the process gets easier, but it still takes many many hours to finalize a rug hooking pattern design. To make the process easier for you, I will work up a few designs based on my standard footstool designs but modified to fit the IKEA stool.

Because IKEA can stop making this stool at any moment, I am not offering pre-drawn patterns, but you can purchase a paper version that you print, tape and trace. Luckily you only need to do it once because the design work is done for you. For extra guidance, you can print instructions for putting the paper pattern together. Please note that this link will take you to my other website, rugcamp.com, where I offer online rug hooking courses.

My Project

You can click on the images to see them larger and use your keyboard to zoom in.
Mac: CMD + to go larger, CMD – to go smaller, CMD 0 to return to normal
On a Windows computer use CTRL instead of CMD.

For this project I am experimenting with backgrounds. When the project is finished, I’ll write a post about that thought process.

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