Portland tufting classes can make anyone into a rug artist

The final product: A strawberry rug on a wall.

Ill-fitting knit hats, Christmas ornaments that leak glitter, lopsided clay bowls. Sometimes, when it comes to crafting, you have to settle for process over product. Appreciating the journey and not the end result.

Oregonian reporter, Lizzy Acker, works on her rug on Thursday, December 18, 2025.

My house is strewn with things I enjoyed making that look, well, terrible.

But sometimes, a craft comes along that even I can make look good. Let me introduce you to tufting.

Tufting is, essentially, the process of making rugs. It’s gained popularity on social media because it’s quite satisfying to watch.

In a sense, tufting is coloring in with yarn and a gun. A tufting gun.

First, cloth is stretched over a frame. Then, a design is drawn directly onto the cloth, usually projected and then traced.

After that, the rug maker uses a tufting gun to fill in open spaces with colored yarn. The gun uses a needle to quickly push yarn through the cloth and then cut it off, creating a tuft of yarn. Hence...tufting.

Oregonian reporter, Lizzy Acker, works on her rug on Thursday, December 18, 2025.

The rug maker works with the gun from the back, creating a fuzzy pattern on the front.

After all the space is filled in, the front is shaved down to an even level, or “carved” to created different elevations of yarn if you’re really advanced, and backing is glued to the pattern to create a rug.

While rug tufting is fun to watch on the internet and not incredibly difficult to do, there are significant barriers to entry – you need a lot of supplies, including a ton of yarn in different colors and a large frame.

Oregonian reporter, Lizzy Acker, works on her strawberry rug on Thursday, December 18, 2025.

And, there’s that tufting gun. That gun, on the low end, will cost you at least $100.

But, in Portland, you can get a taste of tufting without spending hundreds of dollars on equipment and supplies you might never use again.

There are a couple places in town where you can take a class or a workshop in tufting. One of those is Fuzzy Space, a studio in Northeast Portland run by Jordan McGarry.

McGarry, 31, started making rugs during the COVID pandemic.

“I just needed a hobby,” McGarry said in his studio in December. “Saw it on social media, had some time.”

He was already an artist and, he said, “the combination of art and the process of things interested me a lot.”

So he ordered equipment and supplies and got to work.

“It took me two weeks to finish my first rug because there’s just no real good direction on the internet,” McGarry said. “But I have a lot of dedication, so I figured it out and stuck with it.”

McGarry still makes and sells his own rugs, but about a year and a half ago, he started teaching tufting out of his home studio. In October, he moved classes to the space in Northeast Portland.

The classes have exploded in popularity. By January, he said, he had between 40 and 60 students per week and had hired two assistants. He is looking for a bigger studio.

Classes cost between $125 and $225, depending on the size of the rug, and take from one to six hours.

For one-day classes, McGarry finishes the rugs. He also offers two-day classes that go over the finishing process.

He’s also thinking bigger.

“I will be expanding to offer more options like 3-D rugs and multi-week classes that will vary in the end goal and include things like combining cut and loop pile techniques, design, yarn dying and sculptural aspects,” McGarry said.

Those classes will be for more experienced rug makers, he added.

In December, I took McGarry’s class and created my own small, strawberry-shaped rug.

Even though I have watched plenty of videos of the process online, tufting myself was even more fun and satisfying than I expected.

The gun is heavy, and getting used to it takes a few minutes. But once you do, the process is fast and fun. We started around 10 a.m. and by 11:30, my part of the rug-making was done.

McGarry was helpful and flexible, letting me change yarn colors and giving me tips along the way.

By the time I was finished, I was trying to figure out a way I could set up a tufting workshop in my house.

A few weeks later, I picked up my finished rug. It’s definitely not a floor rug – I picked the “small” size – but I love the way it looks on the wall.

It might not be as beautiful as the rugs McGarry makes, but it’s much better than most of the first-try craft items in my possession.

Am I an artist now? Probably not. But I have something pretty, and I had fun making it, and there isn’t much that’s better than that.