How to Make a Spiral Rug Using An Old Climbing Rope — Trip Reports by Jim Brisbine
There comes a point in every climber’s life when a rope that has faithfully carried you up granite faces, limestone sport routes, and alpine couloirs finally earns its retirement. Maybe it took a significant fall. Maybe the sheath is fraying beyond what any amount of care can fix. Maybe it simply has too many years on it to trust with your life anymore. Whatever the reason, you’re left holding fifty or sixty meters of perfectly good nylon that you can’t in good conscience clip into a belay device ever again.
I’ve been climbing for going on twenty-two years now, and over that time I’ve retired more ropes than I’d like to count. For a long time I donated them to gear libraries for practice anchors or chopped them into short lengths for dog leashes and gear hangers around the house. But a couple winters ago, stuck in the house during a stretch of genuinely miserable weather after a trip to the Cascades got rained out for four straight days, I decided to try something I’d seen in a few online forums: turning an old dynamic climbing rope into a coiled spiral rug.
What I ended up with was honestly one of the most satisfying craft projects I’ve ever done, and I’m not a crafty person by any stretch of the imagination. The rug has lived in front of my back door ever since, where it catches mud from hiking boots, sheds dirt easily, and looks genuinely handsome in a sort of utilitarian, earned way that store-bought rugs just don’t have. Several friends have asked me how I made it, and I’ve since helped a few of them make their own. This post is my attempt to document the process in enough detail that you can do it yourself without having to figure out the things I figured out the hard way.
What You’ll Need Before You Start
The most important material is obviously the rope itself. A standard 60-meter dry-treated sport climbing rope is what I used for my first rug, and it made a rug roughly 32 inches in diameter — big enough to be genuinely useful at an entryway without being so large that it dominates the space. If you use a 70-meter rope, you’ll end up with something closer to 36 or 38 inches across. Thicker ropes in the 10mm to 11mm range produce a chunkier, more sculptural rug with more defined coils. Thinner ropes in the 8.5mm to 9.5mm range give you a flatter, tighter result. Both are beautiful in different ways.
The rope doesn’t need to be in particularly good shape for this project, which is part of the point. Faded sheaths, soft spots, or even areas with minor damage are completely fine. The one thing you want to avoid is a rope that has actual structural separation — sections where the core and sheath have fully separated — because that makes the rope harder to work with and can affect the finished rug’s integrity. Otherwise, pretty much any dynamic climbing rope in any condition works.
Beyond the rope, you’ll need a heavy-duty upholstery needle. These are available at any fabric or craft store and sometimes at hardware stores. You want one with a large enough eye to thread paracord or waxed linen thread through, and a point sturdy enough to push through tightly coiled rope without bending. I went through two cheap needles on my first rug before I bought a proper sailmaker’s needle, which has been indestructible ever since.
For thread, you have a few good options. Waxed linen thread is traditional and extremely durable — it’s what sail makers and cobblers use, and it will outlast the rope itself. You can also use heavy nylon thread or even thin paracord. I’ve experimented with matching the thread color to the rope’s sheath, which gives a cleaner look, and with using a contrasting color, which emphasizes the stitching and gives the rug a more handmade, visible-craft aesthetic. Either approach works well.
You’ll also want a sharp pair of scissors or a utility knife for trimming the rope ends, a lighter or matches for sealing those ends (more on that in a moment), and something flat and heavy to lay the rug against while you work — a piece of plywood on the floor is ideal. Some people use a rug mat or foam underneath to help keep the coils from shifting while they stitch.
Optional but useful: a pair of needle-nose pliers for pulling the needle through tight spots, a rubber thimble or a leather finger guard to protect your fingertip when pushing the needle, and a tape measure for checking your diameter periodically if you have a target size in mind.
Preparing the Rope
Before you do anything else, clean the rope if it needs it. A dirty rope sheds dirt onto your floor, which defeats much of the purpose of a doormat. Fill a bathtub with cool water and a small amount of mild soap — the same soap you’d use to wash the rope for climbing purposes — and work through it section by section. Then rinse thoroughly and hang it to dry completely before you start coiling. Wet rope is heavier and harder to work with, and the coils can shift as it dries, distorting your rug’s shape.
Once the rope is clean and dry, find one end and seal it. Dynamic climbing rope is made of a braided sheath over a core of twisted or braided nylon fibers, and if you cut the end without sealing it, both the sheath and the core will unravel rapidly. The standard climbing technique applies here: hold a lighter flame an inch or so from the cut end, rotating it slowly, until the nylon melts and fuses. Don’t put the flame directly on the rope — you want to melt it, not char it. Give it a moment to cool, then press the melted end flat with a damp fingertip or the flat side of a knife. You want a slightly rounded, blunt end that won’t poke through your rug’s surface.
If you’re shortening the rope first — say you want to use only part of it for a smaller rug — measure and cut where you need to, then seal both cut ends the same way.
Starting the Coil
This is where most tutorials get vague, and it’s where I made my biggest mistakes on the first attempt. The center of a spiral rug is the hardest part because you’re working with very little material and the coil wants to pop open. Here’s the method that finally worked for me.
Take your sealed starting end and coil it back on itself in a tight S-shape, making two parallel sections about three inches long. This doubled section becomes the nucleus of your spiral. Thread your needle with about two feet of thread and stitch back and forth through this little doubled section, pulling tight with each pass, until the two parallel rope lengths are bound firmly together. This creates a small, stable platform to build from. Don’t try to make a full loop at the center — it will gap and never lie flat. The S-start method produces a much flatter, more stable center.
Once your center section is stitched solid, begin curving the rope around it in your first true coil. Hold the center section in your non-dominant hand with your thumb on top, and with your dominant hand guide the rope around the outside of the center section. Stitch through both the new coil and the existing center section every inch or so, keeping your stitches tight. The key at this stage is tension: keep the rope against the existing coil firmly while you stitch. If there are gaps, you’ll see them later and won’t be able to fix them easily.
Lay the whole assembly flat on your plywood or work surface after every two or three coils and press it down firmly. If it’s cupping upward or downward, you’ll need to adjust your tension. Cupping upward (like a bowl) means your stitching is too tight and pulling the edges up. Cupping downward (like a saddle) means it’s too loose and the outer coils are drooping. This sounds finicky, and in the first few coils it is. Once you get four or five coils laid down and the rug has some diameter, it becomes much more stable and the tension issues resolve naturally.
Building the Body of the Rug
Once you’ve got a solid center with three or four coils, the rest of the rug is genuinely meditative work. You’re doing the same thing over and over: coiling the rope against the previous coil, stitching through both every inch or so, and periodically laying the whole thing flat to check it.
There are two stitching approaches I’ve seen people use. The first is a simple overhand stitch, where the needle goes over the top of the new coil and through the gap between the new coil and the previous one, then pulls tight. This is fast and functional but leaves visible stitching on the top surface. The second approach, which I prefer, involves angling the needle so it enters from the side of the new coil and exits through the side of the adjacent coil, essentially creating a hidden stitch inside the channel between the two rope sections. From above, you can barely see the stitching at all, which makes for a cleaner finished surface. From below, both methods look about the same.
Whichever method you choose, be consistent. Varying your stitch spacing or angle will be visible in the finished rug as slight irregularities in how the coils lie.
When you run out of thread, simply knot the old end off on the underside of the rug, rethread your needle with a new length, and pick up where you left off. The knots on the underside are invisible in use and add negligible thickness.
Keep checking for flatness. I’ll say this again because it’s the thing that makes the difference between a rug that lies properly and one that humps up in the middle or waves around the edges. Every ten or fifteen minutes, set the rug flat on the floor and look at it from eye level. Adjust as needed before the stitching sets.
Working Through Difficult Spots in the Rope
Older climbing ropes sometimes have sections that are stiffer than others — areas where the rope took heat from a belay device, or where it was stored coiled for a long time, or where the sheath has stiffened from repeated wetting and drying. These sections resist being coiled and can fight you.
The best approach is patience. Work the stiff section back and forth in your hands before you get to it, bending it gently in multiple directions to loosen the fibers. If there’s a genuine kink or set, you can sometimes partially correct it by soaking that section briefly in warm water and working it straight before it dries. In the finished rug, small stiff sections are largely invisible because the surrounding stitching holds everything in place.
Damaged sections — soft spots, slight core exposure — can actually be positioned toward the underside of the rug if you’re careful about how you orient the rope as you coil. The top surface of each coil is what you see; the inner section, the part that’s stitched to the previous coil, is largely hidden. With some attention, you can hide most cosmetic damage this way.
Finishing the Edge
When you’ve reached your desired diameter, you need to finish the final end cleanly. Do not just stop stitching and leave the loose end — it will immediately begin to unspool, and within a few days of foot traffic, your rug will be coming apart at the edge.
First, seal the rope end as you did at the beginning. Then taper the end into the coil rather than simply butting it up against the previous coil. To do this, place the final end so it runs alongside the previous coil for three or four inches, then stitch it down so it nestles into the outside of the rug rather than protruding. The edge of the rug should have a smooth, gradual conclusion rather than a blunt endpoint.
After the end is stitched down, I do a final pass around the outermost coil with a slightly denser stitch pattern, reinforcing the edge. This is the section of the rug that takes the most abuse — the place where feet tend to catch on entry — and the extra reinforcement matters. I’ve had the edges of my rugs take years of daily use without any loosening.
Finishing and Care
Turn the completed rug over and trim any thread tails close to the surface. If you used waxed linen thread, you may want to run a lighter briefly over the underside to melt any fraying thread ends flat — be careful not to scorch the rope. Check the underside for any stitches that look loose or gaps where two coils aren’t held together, and reinforce them before you put the rug into service.
The finished rug can be washed exactly like a climbing rope: in cool water with mild soap, rinsed thoroughly, and hung or laid flat to dry. It dries relatively quickly because you’re essentially just washing the rope again. Don’t put it in a dryer — the heat can degrade the nylon and may loosen some of your stitching.
For high-traffic areas, consider cutting a piece of rug pad to fit underneath. The nylon rope surface is somewhat slippery on hard floors, and a rug pad both prevents sliding and reduces wear on the underside stitching.
A Few Notes from Making Multiple Rugs
My first rug took me most of a long rainy afternoon — maybe six hours total, including the time I spent undoing and redoing the center. My second took about three hours. By my fourth, I was comfortably making one in an afternoon. The learning curve is front-loaded; once you understand how to manage the tension and how the center works, the rest is just time and rope.
I’ve made rugs as gifts for other climbers, and they’ve been well received, not least because the rope itself sometimes carries memories. The blue 9.8mm I retired after a fall at Index, the old dry-treated Beal that came with me on a two-week trip to the Dolomites, the faded yellow rope I bought secondhand fifteen years ago and climbed half the routes I know on. A rug made from a rope like that lives differently in your space than something bought from a catalog.
I’ve also seen people use static ropes, rigging rope, and marine rope for similar projects, and they all work with minor adjustments. Static rope is stiffer and more resistant to coiling, so you may need to soak it in warm water to make it pliable. Marine rope, particularly three-strand twisted nylon, produces a beautifully textured surface because each strand reads visually as it coils.
If you have a collection of shorter retired rope sections from cut cordage or old accessory cord, you can splice them together — seal the ends, overlap them by an inch and stitch the overlap firmly — and make a patchwork rug. These are visually interesting if the colors work together, and they’re a good way to use up small leftover sections that aren’t long enough for anything else on their own.
One Final Thought
There’s something I find genuinely valuable about this kind of project that goes beyond the practical object it produces. Climbing gear accumulates meaning in a way that most equipment doesn’t. The tools of outdoor life — worn ropes, scuffed helmets, boots resoled twice and still going — carry the specific weight of the places and moments you used them in. Making something lasting from a retired rope is a way of keeping that history present without holding onto gear past its safe service life.
My back door rug doesn’t look like much to someone who doesn’t know what it is. But I know that the worn section on the left side near the outer edge is from a long day at Smith Rock, and the faded patch at nine o’clock came from rope drag on a route I’ve since returned to and done cleanly. It’s a record of sorts, flattened into a spiral and laid at the threshold.
That might sound like a lot of weight to put on a doormat. But climbers are used to finding meaning in rope.
