Pet portrait rugs

Everything on this page is a hand-tufted likeness of a real animal: Hruma the gray cat, Lucian at full length, Prince the horse. Each one opened as an ordinary photo emailed in by an owner and ended up as a face built out of yarn instead of printed onto cloth. They are made first of all as textile wall art. Put one on the floor and it works as a decorative rug, though regular or heavy foot traffic is not recommended.

The commission runs identically for any pet you have. Email a clear photo of the dog, the cat, the horse, or whatever else shares the house. Ksenia Derr redraws it by hand as a color-exact mockup and pulls yarn shades against the real coat; the gun does not start until you approve what you see. A handheld tufting gun then pushes acrylic yarn through backing cloth held tight on a frame, one field of color after another. Once the adhesive on the back has dried, the piece leaves the frame and the pile is leveled and shaped in passes. Before anything gets boxed, photographs and video of the finished piece come to you.

Open any portrait to walk through its product gallery, where the finished work is shot from several angles. The galleries for Hruma’s painterly version, for Lucian and for Prince also carry a split comparison: the original pet photo on one half, the tufted portrait on the other. Every portrait page includes its own short video of the making and of the result. Use the gallery and the video to judge the likeness, the workmanship and the finish yourself.

Each portrait here is a custom pet rug drawn from a photograph you send in. The default size is 33 × 33 in, which hangs well over a couch or on a nursery wall; any other dimensions can be ordered, with the number quoted before work starts. The standard square is four business days on the frame, and about two weeks from the order to your door once transit is counted. The mockup sits until you approve it in between, and a booked-up studio stretches that, so the date gets confirmed at the order. Every portrait travels with free tracked shipping across the US.

The five things you pick

Every rug on this page came out of the same commission, put together a different way. Five decisions get made before the drawing starts, and they are yours.

Which animal. Dogs, cats and horses are what most people ask for, but the rug starts life as a drawing and not a print, so the species is not a limit. Prince is a horse, caught with his tongue out. Nobody posed him that way. That is the picture his owner sent.

How much of him. Head and shoulders fits the 33 × 33 in square. A full-length portrait will not sit in that shape and goes on an elongated format instead: Lucian runs 59 × 32.3 in, considerably bigger than the cat is.

What color the coat comes out. Matched to the animal, the way Hruma’s portrait is, or pushed into a loud painterly palette, the way the impressionist version of the same cat is.

What goes behind him. A flat ground, or blocks of color you pick off a palette we send over. Prince sits on blue, yellow and pink.

What else lands in the frame. A favorite toy, a collar, some object that was his. Almost nobody thinks to ask for it. Mention it when the photo goes out and it gets drawn in along with the rest, without stretching the making time.

None of that is an upsell menu. It is the back and forth that happens before a single strand of yarn moves, and the mockup comes back with your answers already in it.

Pet memorial rugs: when the animal is already gone

A good share of these portraits are commissioned after the fact, and those requests almost always arrive with a single photograph, whichever one happened to be last. That is enough. A printed mat needs a clean file; a drawing does not, because the animal gets rebuilt by hand from whatever the frame gives up: the structure of the head, the set of the ears, the light that landed in the eyes. Send the blurry one. Send a photo of a print off the kitchen table. Say what it is when you write, and nobody will ask you for a better picture, because there is no better picture. This is also where the fifth choice stops being decoration: the collar, the toy, the object that was his gets drawn in alongside him.