The macramé rope - how to calculate your needs

Since we offer the macramé rope in the shop, many of you want to try it, but the question of quantity is always the one that makes you hesitate.

For your information, a medium plant stand made up of 8 ropes and measuring approximately 1 meter in length at the end will require around 32 meters of rope.

In order to help you clarify your needs and identify the amount of rope needed for a given project, I offer you this simple calculation formula that will undoubtedly be very useful!

Several factors can influence the amount of rope required. First of all, the choice of project (wall hanging or plant hanging?), the type of knots used, the tension of the knots (are you the loose and airy type or rather tight and compact?), the quantity of knots, and of course the final format desired, are all factors that must be taken into account. 

However, it can be agreed on the principle that the ropes required should measure between 4 and 6 times the length of the finished product. 

So, the information you need to calculate the amount of rope required is:

  • The projected (or desired!) final length of the finished product
  • The number of strings to be used

Let's take the wall hanging above as an example.

  • At its longest, the hanging measures 45 cm.
  • It is composed of 11 strings (folded in 2 to make 22).
  • The knots are rather loose so it will require less rope, so we can assume that 4 times its length would be enough.

For the calculation:

45 cm (the final length) X 4 (for 4 times the length) = 180 cm or 1.8 m
1.8 m X 11 (the number of ropes required) = 19.8 m

20 meters of rope would be enough to make a mural like this one!

If I had wanted to make it tighter, with more knots, I probably would have wanted to calculate 5 X the length to have more rope. So my math would have looked like:

45 cm (the final length) X 5 = 225 cm or 2.25 m
2.25 m X 11 (the number of ropes required) = 24.75 m

That's it! That's it! All you have to do is experiment!

Now that the 100% cotton macramé rope is available online, you can try it out! But it's not the only rope you can use to have fun with knots. Don't hesitate to vary your pleasures. For example, why not try the planter to make a plant stand like this one? Or how about the Fluffy, to make a wall hanging as soft as a cloud?