Latch hook for beginners

What latch hook is

Latch hook is a way of making a pile rug, a wall hanging or a pillow front by knotting short pieces of yarn onto an open grid of rug canvas. Each piece is folded in half before it's knotted, so every knot leaves two tufts standing up. Do that in every square and the tufts crowd together into a soft, shaggy pile that covers the canvas.

It's easy to confuse with rug hooking, which is a different craft. In rug hooking you pull loops of yarn or fabric strips through burlap or linen with a plain hook set in a handle. Latch hook uses a hinged hook and pre-cut pieces, and every piece is knotted on its own.

What you need

The tool is a hook on a shaft with a small hinged latch just below the hook. As you push it through the canvas the latch flips open, and as you pull it back the latch snaps shut over the yarn so it can't slip off. They come straight or with a bent shaft. Neither is better. Try both if you can and keep whichever sits well in your hand.

Rug canvas is an open grid with big holes. Gridded canvas has blue lines woven in every 10 squares, which makes following a chart far easier. Kit canvases often have the design printed right on them in color, a bit like painting by numbers.

Kit yarn comes pre-cut and sorted by color, usually in 2 1/2 inch pieces. If you're buying your own, worsted or bulky weight yarn suits the coarser canvases. Use the same weight all the way through, or the pile will be uneven.

You'll also want masking tape for the canvas edges, sharp scissors and a yarn needle for finishing.

Canvas sizes

Latch hook canvas is sold by holes per inch, sometimes called knots per inch, and the three you'll see most are 3.3, 3.75 and 5. Some canvas, such as Rico's, is labeled by holes per 10 cm instead.

More holes per inch means more detail and more knots. It also means the same chart, knot for knot, comes out smaller. A design 60 knots wide is about 18 inches across on 3.3 canvas, 16 inches on 3.75 and 12 inches on 5. Thicker yarn needs bigger holes, so if you're using bulky yarn, stay with the coarser canvases.

Tying the knot

Before you start, tape all four raw edges of the canvas with masking tape so they don't fray. Then, for each square:

1. Fold a piece of yarn in half over the neck of the tool, just behind the latch, with the two ends together.
2. Push the hook under one horizontal thread of the canvas and up through the hole above it, far enough that the latch goes through and falls open.
3. Lay both yarn ends into the hook.
4. Pull the hook back toward you. The latch closes over the ends and drags them through the folded loop.
5. Tug both ends to snug the knot down against the canvas.

That's the whole technique. After a few dozen you stop thinking about it.

If you crochet, you may find a two-step version easier. Push the empty hook under the thread, catch the middle of a yarn piece and pull it back so you have a loop on the shaft. Push forward until the loop sits behind the open latch, then catch both ends and pull them back through the loop. This makes the knot face the opposite way, which is fine as long as you use one method for the whole piece. Mixing them can leave patches where the pile leans differently.

Which way to work

Most kit and shop instructions start at a bottom corner, left or right, and finish each row before moving up. The finished pile then falls away below your hands instead of flopping into the row you're working.

Some people prefer to start at the top so their hand always rests on bare canvas. That works too. Whichever you choose, stick with it. It also helps to finish each row rather than hopping around the canvas one color at a time. It's easy to miss a square that way, and a missed square is hard to spot once the pile grows around it.

Cutting your own yarn

If you're designing your own piece or a kit runs short, you can cut pieces yourself. Wrap the yarn around a strip of stiff cardboard, then cut along one edge. Each piece comes out about twice the width of the strip. One Bernat pattern uses a strip 2 1/4 inches wide, so its pieces are about 4 1/2 inches, much longer and shaggier than kit yarn.

Count what you need before you cut: one piece per knot. A 24 by 36 inch rug on 3.75 canvas is 90 by 135 knots, which is 12,150 pieces of yarn. That number is a good argument for making a pillow first.

Once the piece is done, you can trim the pile with scissors. Cutting some areas shorter than others gives the surface high and low spots, which can make a simple design look carved.

Designing your own chart

A latch hook chart is a grid with one square per knot, read the same way as any other grid chart. The reading a chart page covers symbols and the color key. Skip its advice to start in the center, though: latch hook goes row by row from a bottom corner. To size a design, multiply the finished size in inches by the holes per inch. A 30 by 30 inch rug on 3.75 canvas is about 112 by 112 knots.

Shaggy pile softens everything, so design for it. Bold shapes, strong contrast and a handful of colors read well from across a room, while one-knot details like a thin outline or a single highlight tend to vanish into the tufts. Pixel art patterns are a good source of ideas, because they're already built from blocks of flat color on a small grid.

Craft Studio's latch hook pattern maker is free with an account and handles grids up to 500 by 500 knots. You can draw knot by knot or import a photo, which is resized to your grid and reduced to as many colors as you choose. Palette analysis then counts the knots in each color, which is exactly the number of yarn pieces to cut. Exports include a printable PDF with symbols and a color key, plus PNG, SVG and EPS.

Finishing a rug, pillow or wall hanging

These steps follow WonderArt's finishing instructions.

Start by trimming any yarn ends that stick up above the rest of the pile. Then trim the canvas, leaving a 1 inch border of bare canvas around the knots.

• For a rug, fold the border to the back and sew rug binding over the folded edge. Miter the binding at the corners so the rug lies flat.
• For a wall hanging, sew a strip of rug binding across the top with both ends open, making a pocket for a dowel or rod.
• For a pillow, cut backing fabric 1 inch larger than the design. Put it right sides together with the latch hook, sew three sides close to the knots so no canvas shows on the front, trim the seams and corners, turn it right side out, add a pillow form and whip stitch the last side closed.
• For the simplest finish, fold the border to the back and whip stitch it down. A Bernat pattern does this with a yarn needle and two strands of yarn held together, leaving 2 squares of canvas to fold.