DIY Boho Macrame Wall-Hanging
- Alex Klemp
- May 1, 2017
- 3 min read
My living room is still decorated for winter. It’s cozy and all, but as the weather's been getting warmer, I’ve been itching to switch things up a bit. I was shopping online, trying to find some inspiration for what I want to do and after seeing a few dozen living rooms all boho-chic with neat macrame wall-hangings as decor, I decided what the heck, I'll make one.
I made a smaller macrame hanging for Ari’s nursery last summer and it turned out really cute! But I wanted this one to be much, much bigger than that. Just warning y'all this is not a small project. But it is going to be 10 times easier if you already know how to tie macrame knots. They are the exact same knots I used to make friendship bracelets as a kid. Think of macrame as just one giant and confusing friendship bracelet.
I saw these larger kinds of wall-hangings were going for around $150-200 on Etsy and one of my favorite things in life is to make super expensive things for super cheap. The whole project ended up only being around $18 plus 4 hours of my time and 2 blisters. I purchased all of my supplies from Walmart but you could also go to the hardware store.
Supplies:
- decent scissors
- strong string (to hang it on the wall)
- wooden stick/dowel
- 400+ feet of rope
For the dowel, I used the thickest wooden dowel they have at Walmart in the crafty aisle.
This is the rope I used: I wanted something more natural-looking and thought this worked great! It's 50/50 cotton/poly. Other blends would work fine; you could even use the real 100% cotton macrame cord if you are hard-core.
Step 1: Cut a 9 to 10-foot piece of rope. I cut initially 9 feet, but they kept getting longer as I cut them.
(What I'm not fond of is the fact that this rope has little dark strings on the inside of it. When the rope frays, you can see the black ends and it is not the look I wanted, so I had to give it a bit of a haircut at the end.)
Step 2: Fold the cord in half and tie it to the wooden dowel like the picture below. Tie up all 30 pieces.
Step 3: Tie a row of square knots down the rope. Then tie square knots again for the second row, but alternating in between the first square knots. The slideshow of pictures below should help. If you don't know how to do a square knot, google will also help.
Step 4: Basically make 3 pyramids of square knots.
Step 5: Tie a half hitch knot around each pyramid, outlining them.
Step 6: Then tie some square knot spirals. This is basically a square knot, but without alternating the ropes that cross over. Because you are not alternating which rope is crossing over, the knot with just spiral on its own.
Step 7: This is where things kind of got out of hand and I started improvising. My plan was to do 2 sets of half-hitches connecting all of the spiral knots but it did not end up looking like half-hitches, So just connected all of the spiral knots with some kind of knot in a triple v-shaped pattern.
The last couple steps are how I made the wall-hanging look more whimsical:
- First I added some pieces on each end that are basically a series of loose, bunched-up square knots.
- Then I draped ropes across the wall-hanging and tied fringe from the draped ropes. I tied the fringe on the draping ropes the same way that I tied the rope on the wooden dowel at the beginning.
(You can scroll through the process below.)
I love the way it turned out! It's a pretty large statement piece for our wall and it adds a lot of character to the room. I'll be adding some more things to our living room in the future, so be looking for more DIY decor posts soon.
Good luck!
