![]() ![]() ![]() Someone who knits, crochets, or crafts can be a great help in getting you going. Enlist a friend, neighbor, parent, or grandparent who likes to work with their hands.Use a wide range of colors and textures, and trust that it will all come together into a work of great beauty. Diversity of materials is to be embraced.When your rug is finished, live on it and make it part of your story.Cut the textiles into strips of relatively uniform width or density, tying them together to make longer segments.Gather old textiles, such as T-shirts, sheets, towels, fabric scraps, anything.It may seem awkward and lumpy at first, but as you add more stitches the rug relaxes and resolves into shape. And don’t let a lack of crafting expertise stop you from giving this a try. Have a stack of old clothes too worn or too beloved to give away? Make them into a rug. The rug that once graced Haeg’s geodesic dome has followed him to his new home several hundred miles north, where it warms a cabin floor. It will be not only a document of your past, made up of formerly loved T-shirts and fraying bedsheets, but also a site where new experiences unfold and new histories accumulate. Your rug will be a field for activity, no matter how you put it to use. Making a rug can be either a communal activity, with materials and labor shared among a group, or a solo endeavor, added to as time allows and textiles accumulate. It is precisely this idea of making oneself at home that is at the core of this assignment. Local contributors brought bread, pickles, flowers, and homemade remedies to present atop the rug, and visitors were invited to take off their shoes and make themselves at home. Inside museums, the rugs became what Haeg calls “Domestic Integrity Fields,” or sites for the presentation of goods and materials gathered from nearby land and gardens. He put his hand-knotting technique to use for his series “Domestic Integrities,” which began with the creation of two rugs, spirally stitched by volunteers and collaborators who added local textiles to the rugs as they traveled from city to city. Haeg honed this method over time, scavenging old textiles and experimenting with crocheting, knitting, and making clothing. On his own or with the help of many, rug making is just one aspect of Haeg’s abiding interest in how we live and make a home, which he explores not only in his own domestic spaces, but also in the notoriously cold, formal spaces of art museums. It was here that Haeg evolved his technique of hand-knotting strips of old T-shirts and bedsheets into giant, colorful rugs. The dome was Haeg’s home and also his place of work, where he welcomed artists and community members for workshops and events, involving collective movement exercises, book discussions, lessons in radical gardening, and much else. Before Fritz Haeg decamped to a revived commune in Northern California, he lived in a geodesic dome on the east side of Los Angeles. ![]()
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