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Hippie Life Skills 101: Making a Toothbrush Rug [1]

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Date: 2023-01-08

How to unleash your inner hippie and make an Amish-style “toothbrush rug”.

For those who don’t know, I live in a campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places I visit. I am currently wintering in Florida.

Now that I’m temporarily in my mobile home base camp for the winter, I needed a couple of small indoor throw rugs and decided to make them for myself.

For the first of them, I decided on a “toothbrush rug”. This is a technique that was developed millennia ago as part of the ancient weaving tradition in Scandinavia and northern Europe known as “naalbinding” (also spelled as “nalbinding” or “nalebinding”, and pronounced “null-bin-ding”), perfected by the Vikings, which uses a single needle (the “naal”) made from wood or bone with a dull point at one end and a slotted hole at the other. They used woolen yarn and naalbinding to make seamless mittens, socks, and beanie caps. In colonial times, the technique was carried to North America by Germans who became known as “Pennsylvania Dutch” or “Amish”. Here, the technique became known as “Amish knots”, and was used to make round or oval rugs from strips of cloth. Since the Amish often made their needle from the handle of an old toothbrush, these became known as “toothbrush rugs”. Today handmade Amish rugs are highly prized by crafters.

So, here’s how I made my toothbrush rug.

The first step is to make a “naal” or needle. This is two or three inches long and around a quarter-inch wide, and thick enough so it won’t break. The ancient Europeans made their needles from pieces of wood or bone that were painstakingly ground into shape by rubbing it on a rough rock, drilled through at one end using a wooden bow drill or, later, an iron drill bit, then polished with a smooth stone to prevent it from snagging the yarn. The Amish, as noted, made their needles by drilling a hole through a toothbrush handle and then grinding or sanding the other end to a dull point.

I made three simple needles for myself: the first was made from the handle of a plastic spoon, and the second was made from a wooden craft stick. In both of these, you just need to drill a slot in one end and sand the other end into a dull rounded point. My third needle was made by bending a length of thin wire into two loops (a paperclip opened up and squeezed in the middle will also work), and wrapping the middle with duct tape—this forms a long slot at one end and a blunt narrow looped point at the other. After trying all three, I found the wire naal to be the most useful since you can make smaller loops with it.

Three quick and dirty naals, or needles. They are about 2.5 inches long.

For over 50,000 years, “woven textiles” were the most sophisticated and advanced of all human technologies. In its earliest form, weaving probably consisted of hand-tying lengths of cordage together at intervals to form fishing nets, mesh bags and other useful implements. Later, the process of making and weaving yarn on a loom was developed. Woolen yarn in particular was the end product of a complex process of shearing, carding, and spinning. The English words “net”, “knot” and “knit” all have a common linguistic source—they come from the Proto-Indo-European root “ned”, meaning “to tie”.

Most Amish toothbrush rugs, however, were not made from yarn and they do not use a loom. Being a practical and resourceful people, the Amish would make their rugs from strips of cloth that had been torn from worn-out bedsheets or pillowcases, and recycled them into rugs. These strips were cut an inch or two wide: wider strips make thicker rugs but also use up more fabric. Today, old t-shirts make good rug material. Some enterprising modern crafters use plastic shopping bags, for weatherproof outdoors doormats. And of course there is always Jo-Anns or Michaels for whatever color(s) cloth you want. I bought a bunch of remnants for cheap and cut them into strips.

(There are a zillion tutorials on YouTube that give detailed instructions for how to do the Amish-knot weave. It’s quite similar to making a coiled basket. It’s hard for me to show it well here since it takes two hands to do it and another two hands to work the camera. But I can at least give an idea what the process is like. And since this is my first try, things may be a bit rough-looking.)

Ready to start weaving

Once you have your needle and your strips of cloth, you are ready to begin weaving. The first step is to attach two of the strips together.

Cut a slit in the end of one piece. Then push one end of the other piece through that and cut a slit in that end too.

Tuck the tail of the second piece through that new slit ...

… and pull it tight

The strip of cloth on the right will be the “core” strip, and the strip on the left will be the “working” strip. The tail end of the working strip goes through the slit in the needle. Use the needle to tie four ordinary overhand knots around the core.

The needle now goes down through one of the loops made by the knots, up over the working strip, then is pulled tight around the core strip. This will make a coil.

Now it is a matter of repeating over and over, continually wrapping the working strip through the coil loops and around the core strip, to make the coil as big as you need it to be. Splice in new strips (and new colors) when necessary, and keep working the coils to keep the whole thing flat (if you make the coils too tight they’ll begin to curl in and make a “cup” shape, which you don’t want).

Halfway done

Finished rug

My indoors doormat was much simpler to make. It’s done by simply rolling a 50-foot length of 1/2-inch jute rope into a flat coil, then running a bead of adhesive (like Liquid Nails) around all the seams:

Just a thin bead will do the job of holding the coils together

The glued part becomes the bottom of the rug

Let it dry overnight, and it’s done:

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