Weeks after the celebrations and fireworks, your new year’s resolutions are probably still fresh in your mind, telling you that you have to strive for something better. Some of us have fitness goals. Others have vowed to travel. But maybe you have a goal that’s closer to home: making improvements to your home condo design.
You can try to reach that goal by renovating, buying new furniture, and making major changes that will take a lot of time and money. But remember, condo living is about maintaining a certain lifestyle, and that sometimes means marrying a design aesthetic with a soul-nourishing process or pursuit. One example is macramé, a craft that involves knotting threads together to form nets, fabrics, and ribbons, to name a few. In this article, we’ll cover some project ideas that you can work on to incrementally improve and beautify your home.
Suspend Your Succulents
Perhaps the simplest macramé project is creating plant hangers. By applying knowledge of basic macramé knots, you can infuse your space with a unique touch of greenery without losing valuable space on your floor or desk (admit it: as a condo owner, you know that the struggle for space is real). Installing two or three hanging plants will introduce some welcome oxygen, and it’ll help macramé rookies get their feet wet.
Take the Next Step with Tassels
The next step in familiarizing yourself with macramé materials is to make tassels for your wall. With practice, you’ll soon have the technique to bunch up and tie together yarns with the right volume and shape that you can proudly display. Just for fun, you can also use dyes to experiment with colors. You’ll be surprised how such a simple project can totally transform a space.
Netting to the Next Level
A net isn’t just for catching fish or basketball hoops, it can also be effective in breaking up and adding texture to an otherwise unremarkable flat surface. The best macramé ideas require the anchoring of threads and yarns to a frame or support before systematically knotting them together; wooden dowels are arguably the simplest thing to affix your threads to, which makes a loose-net wall hanging a good training project.
The Next Round: Circular Wall Hangings
While the circle is among the most basic shapes we learn in childhood, actually drawing or creating something with radial symmetry requires a bit of dexterity. That’s what makes creating a circular wall hanging, similar to a dreamcatcher, a good exercise. Sure, you could have the luxury of having hoops that you can tie your threads to, but little misalignments in knots can add up and make the final piece undeniably crooked. By the time you make one you can proudly put on your living room wall, you’d have developed the precision and attention to detail needed for more complex projects.
Liven Up Your Lampshade
Working on macramé projects for the condo is a liberating activity. With a bit of time and skill, you can transform your space to your heart’s content. Aside from its psychological and mental benefits, macramé crafting helps people put their own brand of style on their home. Going from circular wall hangings to lampshades is a perfect transition from two dimensions to three, and it’s a great way to really start adding personal touches to your condo furnishings.
Some Nice Threads For Your Bottle
By now you should have been bitten hard by the DIY macramé bug. Having mastered wall hangings and loose lampshades, you’re ready for more complex examples of the best macrame ideas for condo spaces. If you have some wine bottles lying around, you can start work on making stylish macramé sleeves and covers for them. You can also create covers for glasses, vases, and other tabletop ornaments.
Cultivate Your Flower Power
Making tiny flowers to accentuate your macramé pieces may seem like child’s play, but don’t be fooled: tying the threads tightly without ending up with something that looks deformed or wilted is harder than most people think. It takes patience and nimble fingers—something that you can only develop if you’re willing to meticulously craft even the tiniest details.
Glam up Your Gadgets
Cellphones, tablets, and iPods: electronic devices that people can’t seem to tear themselves away from. And they’re no longer just a status symbol, but they’re also an extension of people’s identity, to the point that people want to dress them up. If you don’t want to spend hundreds or thousands of pesos just to make your gadget look cute, you can craft a macramé sleeve or pouch for it. There are many tutorials online (including this one) that can help you. With the right practice, you can even learn to mix different colored threads to create awesome patterns.
See Beauty in the Beads
Using macramé to decorate the condo doesn’t mean limiting yourself to threads and yarns as medium: you can use other materials as well. Many hobbyists like to use beads to adorn their projects because they add a different kind of weight and color to the finished product. Even the simplest lampshade can become awesomely funky with the right threads and beadwork.
Towel Holders with a Twist
Macrame craftworks don’t have to be just ornamental, they can be functional too. Go beyond lampshades and gadget pouches by creating ornamental towel holders for your guest bathroom. Not only do they add a soft textural contrast to your hard tiles, they also make guests feel at home.
Blank and Boring Wall? Color It Up
Wall hangings don’t have to stop with simple netting, tassels, and single-color circles. You can put together all you’ve learned from using threads of different colors, infusing beadwork, and making flower patches to create a macramé tapestry for your wall. Ideally, the colors you choose for your project should blend well into the overall theme of the room where you plan to hang it once it’s finished.
Channel Your Animal Spirits
A wise man once said that one must first learn the rules before he has the license to bend and break them. In the same way, once you’ve mastered all the techniques and principles of macramé, you can play with them to create unique and playful pieces. Animal-shaped wall hangings are a favorite among hobbyists that you can start with, and hopefully you can learn enough to come up with your own ideas and designs.
Your condo is your home, and there are a lot of ways you can put your fingerprints all over it. You can hire contractors to add a splash of paint or replace old-but-still-good furniture with new pieces just to achieve a new look. But there’s something to be said about the DIY approach for condo crafts. Making macramé crafts, like all creative hobbies, instills a sense of discipline, beauty, appreciation for design, and pride—and you can’t buy those.