How To Make Rya Knots

Although technically it’s not a weave, rya knots can be found everywhere in woven tapestries.

They are great for adding a fringe to your weave or to add texture throughout.

Rya knots are one of the most important tools that you have at your disposal as a weaver.

So let’s take a look at how to make rya knots step by step.

1. Prepare your yarn

To make rya knots you will need to use short strings of yarn, rather than one long string of yarn. So start by cutting the yarn in short strings.

The best way to make a lot of these strings at once is to wind the yarn around an object and cut the top and/or bottom.

Since I only needed short strings I simply wound the yarn around my left hand and then cut it with my right hand.

In general, you want to cut the strings a little longer than necessary, since you can always cut them shorter after making the rya knots.

2. Place two strings over the warp threads

Take two of the short yarn strings you just made and place them on top of the warp strings. Make sure you center them a little above the location you want the rya knot to be.

3. Wind the right half of the strings around the right warp thread

Take the right half of the strings and wind it around the right warp thread once as shown below.

Afterwards, make sure that the left and right half of the strings are still equally long. Or else you will end up with an uneven knot.

4. Do the same for the left half

Repeat step 3 for the remaining half of the strings.

5. Pull the strings down

To form the rya knot you simply have to pull down on both ends of the strings at the same time.

6. Make adjacent rya knots to form a fringe

Now that you know how to make a rya knot, you can repeat the process several times to make adjacent rya knots and form a fringe.

A single layer of rya knots might be enough to make a nice fringe if you are working with thick yarn. However, my yarn was pretty thin and my fringe looked a little underwhelming.

So I decided to add a second row of knots.

7. Add a second row of rya knots (optional)

If you decide to add a second row of rya knots you want to make sure that you offset the knots by one warp thread. This way the new knots will be located between the old knots and fill in the gaps nicely.

Adding extra texture and volume to your weave with big rya knots

So far we have talked about making rya knots by using two strings at a time.

But guess what? You can use as many strings as you like!

If you want your fringe to look luscious but you don’t have access to very thick yarn, you can simply make rya knots by using 3 or 4 strings at a time.

Below you can see a rya knot with 3 strings.

After two rows of rya knots you can see that the resulting fringe is much denser than the fringe we made when only using 2 strings per rya knot.

Don’t forget that you can adjust the shape of the fringe by cutting the edges with a pair of scissors.

If the fringe is at the bottom of my weave I like to keep them horizontal. But if they are somewhere in the middle of the weave, I like to cut them into a diagonal.

Adding extra color to your weave with the multi-color rya knot

You can spice up your rya knots by using strings of different colors at the same time.

As you can see, I prepared several strings of pink, blue and purple of the same color.

I then made rya knots with 3 strings and make sure that I had 1 string of each color.

As you can see below, the result is super colorful.

These crazy rya knots might fit in with every design. But I hope that you will give them a try once and see if you like them.