Rug business Thrums Up now open

By KELSEY HAUGEN

CNA associate editor
khaugen@crestonnews.com

As Nathan Hamilton details the chronological steps of weaving, he threads his nearly century-old loom in his new studio in Creston.

“No one ever showed me how to do this,” he said. “Everything I’ve done I’ve figured out on my own. I don’t know if it’s right or not, but it works for me. And to me, it’s fascinating.”

The 67-year-old first became interested in weaving around age 12 on a vacation in Mount Pleasant.

“I saw somebody weaving and I thought, ‘Well, that’s just fascinating as all get out.’ About 20 years later, I had a chance to buy a loom,” said Hamilton of Creston.

After graduating from Lenox High School and attending a couple years of college, Hamilton entered the workforce before graduating college. Over the years, he worked in construction, floral design, at the Creston Livestock Auction cafe and started a business in the 1980s with his ex-wife, Robin, called Ruggedly Yours.

During that time, former magazine Country America featured the couple’s handmade-rug business in an article.

“The Judds were on the front, and we were the centerfold,” Hamilton said.

But back then, it wasn’t a good time to run a rug business because people still liked wall-to-wall carpet.

“When we separated, I gave her all the looms and everything and walked away from it in the early ‘90s,” he said. “Then, a few years ago, I had a chance to buy a loom, and I thought, ‘You know, I never really liked the way we ran our other business. I’m going to do it the way I want to do it.’”

They used to use entirely white wool and dye the colors.

Now on his own, Hamilton has become interested in a different technique: cutting up wool blankets of various colors and patterns and weaving them into rugs. He decided to launch a new weaving business using this concept, Thrums Up, located at 114 N. Maple St. in Creston, where he sells wool rugs made from blankets, denim rugs, upholstery rugs and antique furniture.

“This year, I started marketing out at the farmers markets, and the response was so good that I said, ‘OK, if I’m going to do anything, let’s do it now.’ I rented this building, and here we are,” Hamilton said. “Right now, everybody’s into tile, hardwood, things like that, which rugs just work great on.”

Before deciding to open a store, Hamilton sold rugs during Southwest Iowa Hot Air Balloon Days and at shows in Mount Pleasant and Creston. He has sold about 50 rugs in the past year.

He also asked Rex and Lois Daub, owners of Windy Acres Antiques on Jaguar Avenue, to sell some of his rugs.

“I liked the quality and I thought maybe I had a market for some. They sold,” Lois said. “And, my daughter has sold some of his rugs in Kansas City when she had a booth there.”

Shortly after that, Hamilton decided he was busy enough to start a business. The name, Thrums Up, arose from his love for weaving and appreciation for puns.

“Thrum is a weaving term,” he said. “When you make a rug, there’s a certain amount you can’t use because it just won’t go any farther. That’s called a thrum. What a lot of people do with them is they’ll start their next rugs with that thrum.”

Wool rugs

Hamilton’s wool rugs start as blankets. He purchases old blankets – some that still have a price tag on them and others that are worn.

“I like to find blankets that are a little bit shot – maybe a moth hole here and there – so people don’t want to use them for blankets anymore, and then I don’t feel so bad tearing them up,” he said. “I use a lot of military blankets. One I have right now is a Navy blanket probably from the ‘40s or ‘50s. Another was made in Australia in 1944.”

He takes a blanket, tears it into strips, measures the strips and then decides what type of pattern he wants to make.

“Once I figure out how I’m going to do it, I sew the strips back together and get all the strips I can get on a shuttle at one time, and then I hand-stitch those pieces together and keep it continuous,” he said.

He then dresses the loom.

“You have to wind all the thread on, do it 24 threads at a time. There’s 24 threads for every two inches,” Hamilton said. “Then, you thread it through, tie it off, and then you’re ready to weave. Weaving is the very last step of all this other stuff just to get there.”

Depending on the size of the rug, it may take a day or two to complete.

“Sometimes they work up really well; sometimes they fight you, for whatever reason,” Hamilton said. “If I push really, really hard, I might get two and a half rugs done a day.”

While his loom was made in the 1920s or ‘30s, he has worked on looms nearly 300 years old.

“Weaving hasn’t changed since they invented it thousands of years ago,” Hamilton said. “I eventually want to be able to make 5-foot rugs, and if I can find (a loom) big enough, even up to 9 feet,” Hamilton said. “That way, I’d be able to do rugs from 18 inches to 9 feet.”

The best part of making wool rugs using patterned blankets is not knowing exactly what the pattern on the finished rug will look like, Hamilton said.

“This one right here was a surprise,” he said, pointing to a wool rug. “When I started, all the pieces were roughly the same length. When you sew them together alternately, you know it’s going to make a pattern because the same width going back and forth all the time is going to do something. But, I didn’t know it was going to do anything like this. ... I thought it was going to make a diagonal across, but it didn’t. It came out looking really nice, though.”

Denim and upholstery rugs

In contrast to wool rugs, Hamilton said blue-jean rugs are simple to make, and people tend to enjoy them because “they wear forever.”

He also makes rugs using upholstery fabric.

“You can do anything to those rugs you could to your upholstery – spot clean them, throw them in a washing machine, whatever you want to do, and they come out looking great,” he said. “The colors never fade.”

One of a kind

As each rug is handmade with different materials and patterns turn out differently from one rug to the next, not even two of Hamilton’s rugs are the same.

“It’s instead of having something that everybody else can get by going to Bed, Bath & Beyond or one of those places. Yeah, they’ve got rugs, but there’s 10,000 of them,” he said. “If you get one of mine, you’re never going to find another one like it.”

Hamilton makes custom rugs ranging in width from 18 to 48 inches. The length is whatever a customer desires. Cost is from $8 to $10 per square foot. The smallest rug costs about $32 and the most expensive is about $350.

“He has a way about putting colors together that are unique,” Lois said. “The quality is very good.”

In store, there are rugs and blankets for sale, as well as pieces of antique furniture. The store is now open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday with a grand opening slated for November.

Contact Hamilton at 641-202-3210 for more information.