I've made a couple small rugs before (which you can finish in around a day), but I eventually really wanted to make a much bigger rug.

To start, I built a 6'x8' frame for the monks cloth (the base for the rug) to sit upright. I lined the edges with carpet tack strips, which would hold the cloth in place without glue and allow me to retension the fabric in place.

After tracing a design onto the canvas using a projector, I used a tufting gun and a ton of yarn to "color in" the rest of the rug. The tufting gun can sometimes cause holes in the canvas, so I had to tuft some patches off to the side and then piece them together. Afterwards, I used a hair trimmer to shear the yarn so that it's level. I then glued a backing onto the canvas so that the yarn couldn't come back out, then cut the excess canvas out.