Macrame Your Own Hammock

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Some of that excess, of course, can be braided into sturdy (it's better to make them too heavy rather than too light!) and ropes for hanging the finished bed ... or you can buy substantial stantial eyebolts and solidly mount a set in each location that you expect to suspend your hammock.

THE BEGINNING

Macramé is the craft of tying a string or strings together again and again to produce a large or small, strong and often decorative, fish net-type structure. The process is quite simple and easy and — for a hammock — you'll need to use only the most basic knots.

Start your hammock by hanging one of the two poles or branches flat against a wall, a little above eye level and parallel to the floor. If you firmly secure two eyebolts in the wall and suspend the pole by two ropes tied to its ends and fastened to the bolts, your beginning hammock will resemble a trapeze at this point (see Fig. 1).

If the finished sling bed will be hung permanently where you make it, right now is an excellent time to test the strength of pole, ropes and bolts. Get a friend and — together — grab the branch, do chin-ups and bounce on it. Try anything you can think of to make sure that the pole won't break and the anchors won't pull out of the wall. An exhaustive test now is much better than a rude awakening later, in the middle of the night.

Now cut the cord for the body of the hammock into 40 lengths of 32 yards each. Fasten every string — at its midpoint — to the pole by doubling the strand and bringing the loop it makes underneath the branch and back to the front where the long ends of the cord can be pushed down through the loop (see Fig. 2). Tighten and snug the first doubled string ... and then stop!

At this point (with only one cord looped around the stick) you may already have an inkling of how incredibly easy it would be to hopelessly tangle 80 separate tails (each 32 yards long!) ... so we're going to take care of that problem before it has a chance to develop.

What we're going to do is coil each long, ungainly tail into a neat and compact bobbin. Start by curling the first string around and around the thumb and little finger of one hand in a "Figure-8" pattern (as shown in Fig. 3) until you only have a yard or so of twine left. Then tie up the bobbin — so it won't fall apart — with the yard-long free end.

Repeat the bobbin-making process with the second string from the first loop ... then attach all the other cords to branch one-by-one and shorten them into double bobbin you go along.

You should finish this first step in making your hammock with 40 double loops (80 separate strings and bobbins) evenly spaced across the middle three feet of your five-foot long pole (see Fig. 4). The foot or so of "empty" space on either end of the branch is your guarantee that none of the cords will slip off the staff. You're ready to start knotting.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print