Macrame Your Own Hammock

Image Gallery Using a few simple knots, you can make your own hammock! ISTOCKPHOTO/MARK TREESE

Living in balmy Ibiza, Spain calls for a lazy, comfortable bed ... and when I first moved here (up in the mountains overlooking the Mediterranean), I decided to make myself the laziest, most comfortable bed of all by macrameing my own hammock. The project was quite simple, very inexpensive and a lot more fun than buying a cot, couch or four-poster. The steady day-and-night uses to which I've put my handiwork since it was finished have also been a far greater creative joy than I'd expected.

Living with a fish net hammock is really fun when you arrange places to hang it both inside and out ... so you can spend your days under big shady trees and your nights floating above the day's accumulated clutter. A sling bed is also super-great in a small apartment or single room because there's so much completely open floor space under the hammock for storing belongings or for use as extra sleeping area for a friend. During the day the piece of flexible furniture can be used as a storage rack ... or magically transformed into a decorative tent by merely attaching its middle to the ceiling in a few places. Furthermore, a hammock is also a wonderfully convenient piece of warm weather camping gear: it's easy to pack and lets air circulate all around you when you sleep ... while keeping you out of reach of the creepy-crawlies and up off the cold, damp ground. When it rains you can just pull a canvas tarp over you so that it extends down past the sides of your aerial resting place ... and the water will drain right off, leaving you snug inside.

MATERIALS

You can macrame a hammock from the simplest of ingredients: two poles for the ends, cord for the middle and two eyebolts or some extra rope with which to hang the finished work of art.

I wanted my hammock to look earthy so, for the poles, I cut two tree branches that were each five feet long, 2½ to 3 inches in diameter, moderately straight, smooth and strong enough to hold all the weight I figured I'd ever want to load onto the finished bed. It doesn't matter whether you scrounge, make or buy wooden or metal poles for your hammock ... just make sure that the ones you use are heavy enough and about two feet longer than you expect the width of the finished fish net bed to be.

Your rope or cord should be thin, strong and slip-proof (so that when you tie a knot, it stays tied). Hemp, jute and cotton twines or light ropes are all very good but, while nylon is both thin and strong, it doesn't hold a firm knot without a lot of coaxing.

I chose hemp cord (the size I used shows three separate groups of fibers when you unroll a section) because it's thin enough to tie easily, the knots hold well and it's relatively inexpensive (a 200 meter roll cost me 50 pesetas, or about 75 cents). For my hammock, I used six rolls or 1,200 meters (about 1,310 yards) or $4.50 worth of the twine. By the way, don't worry about trying to measure out your cord to the exact yard be cause you're going to have a lot of excess footage on the ends of the macraméd hammock when you're done.