To start, I built a 6'x8' frame out of plywood to hold the monks cloth canvas upright and maintain tension. To hold the rug in place, I used carpet tack strips, which has nails sticking out to grip onto the fabric.

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 rip holes in the canvas, so I tufted some patches which I later puzzled in to fill in the holes. To make sure the yarn doesn't come back out, I applied glue to the back of the canvas. I then glued a backing fabric onto the canvas so it could be used like a regular rug and not slide on the floor. Afterwards, I used a rug trimmer to shave off the excess yarn. I also sewed in some D-rings for mounting so it could be displayed as wall art.

It was a very long process, taking me 8 months start to finish! Here's how the final rug turned out.

This isn't the first rug I've made - I've made several smaller rugs in the past (seen on the left) which were around 1-2 feet in each dimension. Unsurprisingly, the difficulty doesn't scale linearly with size, and I found maintaining tension within this larger rug was the most challenging part, requiring generally more pressure on the tufting gun and retensioning more frequently.