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Publication: Oklahoma Daily, , University of Oklahoma Norman Campus, Norman, OK
It all started with an email thread.
The subject line of the OU mass email sent in late September to thousands of students was “Rug, Rug, Who’s There?: Join a new club on campus!” It opened similarly, with a chant-like repetition of “rug” in all capital letters. By the end of the fall semester, the Rug Making Club had turned into one of the largest art clubs on campus.
Freshman Aksel Sozudogru and sophomore Prakhyat Rachamalla, the founders of the Rug Making Club, initially guessed around 20 to 30 people would sign up for the group. Within two weeks, the club’s GroupMe had around 300 members. Within a month, the executive team had grown from two people to nine. Shortly after, it gained funding from SGA.
“I started the club so we can all enjoy (rug making) together,” Sozudogru, a computer science freshman, said. “And now we get to.”
The art of rug making has recently sewn itself into the mainstream through TikTok, a social media app based on short videos. Julian Armstrong, an artist in San Antonio, claims to have posted the first “viral” video of rug making, which has garnered more than 1 million views since being posted in August 2020.
While rug-making has been around for hundreds of years in various methods, including simple at-home ‘rag rugs’ that sparked interest this year, the rug making that’s gone viral uses the method called “tufting.”
With tufting, clumps of yarn are pulled through a fabric backing in a design using a tufting needle or gun. A tufting gun makes the process particularly quick and efficient, leading many rug makers to purchase them and start selling their art. For example, the website tuftinggun.com reported a 648 percent increase in sales of the tool in late 2020 compared to the same time in 2019.
Since the tufting method went viral, rug making has become a massive method of expression and content creation on social media. It was through these platforms that Sozudogru and Rachamalla first became passionate about rug making.
Sozudogru was initially interested in custom shoemaking in high school in Turkey, even designing a few of his own. That led him to social media...