The History of Macramé: Origins, Meaning & 800 Years of Knots

⏱ 12 min read · 📅 Updated April 2026 · By Nicole Woo

So here's something that genuinely blew my mind when I first learned it: the history of macramé stretches back 800 years, and the four little knots I teach every week in my tutorials are almost exactly the same four knots a 13th-century weaver in North Africa was tying by candlelight. Same motions. Same cord over cord. Same rhythm. It's wild.

Pull on the thread and the whole story unspools — Arab weavers finishing their textiles, British sailors knotting belts on six-month voyages, Queen Mary II gossiping with her ladies-in-waiting at court, a 70s California living room full of jute plant hangers, and now us, in 2026, tying those same knots in our bedrooms with a plant dangling somewhere nearby. I'm so glad you're here for the full story. 🌿

What Does "Macramé" Mean? The Etymology Behind the Knots

Let's start with the word itself, because it's a tiny mystery that took me ages to untangle. Most etymologists trace "macramé" back to the Arabic miqramah (you'll also see migramah) — meaning a fringe, an ornamental border, or a decorative veil sewn onto a hand-loomed cloth. That's the version most textile historians lean toward, and it lines up beautifully with what those first weavers were actually doing.

There's a second theory too: that the word comes from the Turkish makrama, a knotted, fringed bathhouse towel. Honestly, I think both are right. Words don't travel in straight lines — they get passed around, borrowed, bent, and reshaped. Arabic and Ottoman-Turkish probably both poured into the word we use today.

And here's the lovely part — the word migrated along exactly the same trade routes as the craft. In Andalusian Arabic it became makramiyya. Under Moorish rule in 1200s–1300s Spain it slipped into Spanish. Italy softened it to macramè. France — always eager to put a proper accent on things — gave us macramé. And English just copy-pasted the French spelling in the 1860s and called it a day.

Ancient Origins — 13th-Century Arabic Weavers

Picture a 13th-century weaver in North Africa, sitting at a low wooden loom in a softly-lit workshop. She's just finished a bath towel — cream cotton, a bit of ochre — and rather than snipping the raw cord ends off the edge, she starts tying them. Knot over knot over knot, until the bottom of the cloth blooms into a patterned fringe. It's half practical (keeps the weave from unravelling) and half "because it's prettier this way." That little moment, repeated in workshops across North Africa and the Middle East, is where macramé starts.

The earliest surviving pieces come from Arab bath-house textiles — hammam towels with knotted fringes — plus ceremonial shawls, veils, and decorative wall hangings. Here's a fun one: Islamic art of the period was already obsessed with geometric symmetry and repetition. Macramé's mirror-image knot patterns fit that aesthetic like they were made for it. So the craft didn't just exist — it flourished, on a bed of ideas that already loved exactly what it was doing.

To be fair, decorative knotting is older than the 1200s. Persia, Babylonia, and Assyria all produced knotted textiles going back thousands of years, and archaeologists keep finding ancient fragments of knot-craft across the old Near East. But the specific family tree that leads to the European macramé we know today? That one starts with those 1200s Arab weavers — and it reached Europe thanks to a bit of conquest.

When Moorish rulers brought their textile traditions north into Spain in the 13th and 14th centuries, macramé came along for the ride — right alongside silk, tile-work, and mathematics (the Moors gave Europe a lot). From Andalusia the craft drifted north into Italy and France over the next couple of hundred years, quietly embedding itself into European making. Curious about the fibres people actually used through all this? I've got a whole deep-dive in my complete cord & materials guide. And for the really obsessive among us, the Wikipedia article on macramé is a lovely rabbit hole.

How Sailors Spread Macramé Across the World

Here's the plot twist nobody sees coming: the reason macramé spread across the globe isn't kings or queens or fashion magazines. It's sailors. Between the 1600s and 1800s, British, American, and European sailors quietly carried this craft to every port city they touched — and kept it alive for centuries when it fell out of fashion everywhere else.

Makes sense when you think about it. Sailors were already walking encyclopedias of knots — rigging, splicing, reef knots, hitches, bowlines, sheet bends. That was just Tuesday. And voyages could last six months or more, with long empty stretches between watches. What do you do with all those hours? You need something you can make with zero equipment. A length of rope and your hands — that's the whole kit. Macramé, with its repetitive, almost meditative rhythm, slotted right in.

So sailors knotted. They made hammocks, bell fringes, belts, knife lanyards, bottle covers, sea-chest handles, and decorative rope mats for the captain's cabin (nothing like a knotted mat to suggest you take your job seriously). They also made smaller things to sell — plaited belts, knot-work jewellery, little rope fobs — and bartered them at port for a few extra coins. That's the mechanism, honestly: British sailors carried macramé to Asia, American sailors dropped it all over the Pacific, European sailors traded it everywhere between. By the mid-1800s you could find recognisable macramé traditions in port cities from Shanghai to San Francisco. Wild, right?

The sailors even had their own lingo. "Square knotting" was what they called macramé — and the especially intricate decorative work some of them produced was nicknamed "McNamara's lace", which is half affectionate and half a gentle tease at the kind of fringe a very bored sailor might spend three weeks on. Here's the wild part: when you tie a Square Knot today, you're using the exact same motion a sailor used on an 18th-century merchant ship. Exactly the same.

Queen Mary II and the Victorian-Era Macramé Boom

Okay, royal gossip time. The first time macramé became a proper polite pastime in Europe, we can thank Queen Mary II of England — who took the throne with William III in 1689. Mary is said to have learned macramé (back then it was called "knotting" or "square knotting") and taught it to her ladies-in-waiting at court. The exact historical record is a little thin, but it's a story that's been passed down for centuries — and what we can confirm is that knotting became fashionable among upper-class English ladies right around this period. When the royals take up a craft, everyone else follows.

It quietly simmered for most of the 1700s as a bit of an aristocratic hobby — and then came the Victorian era, roughly 1860 to 1900, and macramé went absolutely everywhere. Victorians loved elaborate, densely-ornamented interiors (the more textures the better), and macramé was basically made for that moment. Homes got dressed up with fringed tablecloths, mantelpiece runners, lace-like curtains, doilies, shawls, antimacassars (those little head-rest covers on armchairs), and honestly — entire fringed canopies over four-poster beds. It's a lot.

The thing that really tipped macramé from niche to mass was instruction books. The big one — and I mean the one every serious macramé nerd should know — was Sylvia's Book of Macramé Lace, published in London in 1882. Think of it as the first how-to guide with actual patterns, cord lengths, and finishing techniques written in a way a regular middle-class woman could follow at her kitchen table. Within ten years macramé had spread from English country houses to parlours across Europe and North America. A proper little publishing revolution.

A lot of the best surviving Victorian pieces live in museum archives today — the Victoria & Albert Museum in London has a gorgeous macramé collection, everything from delicate collar fringes to curtain panels a couple of metres long. Honestly, this era is where we get most of the "what macramé even looks like" vocabulary we still borrow from today. ✨

The Quiet Decades — Early 20th Century

After the Victorian big bang, macramé went quiet for about fifty years. Not dead — just resting. The aesthetic that took over after the First World War was Art Deco, then Modernism, then Bauhaus — clean lines, sharp geometry, nothing fringed, nothing fussy. Mass-produced furniture. Chrome everything. The warm, slightly-rustic feel of a hand-knotted macramé runner suddenly looked very old-fashioned, and most people quietly put their cord down.

But "out of fashion" isn't the same as "gone." Macramé stayed alive through those quiet decades thanks to three unlikely groups — sailors (still knotting at sea, as they had been for three hundred years), folk-art communities tucked into rural Europe and North America, and a handful of craft revivalists who kept the techniques going almost out of stubbornness. That half-century of invisibility turned out to be really important, actually. When macramé came roaring back in the 1960s and 70s, every single knot was still there — intact, ready, waiting for the next generation to pick it up. 🧶

The 1970s Bohemian Revival

If you ask someone to picture macramé, nine times out of ten they're picturing the 1970s. And fair — this was the decade macramé truly belonged to. The counterculture vibe that had been brewing through the late 60s brought with it a deep love for handmade, natural, "authentic" things, and macramé slotted perfectly in. It was cheap (a ball of jute cost next to nothing), portable, and produced big beautiful results you could hang up and show off by Sunday. An absolute dream of a hobby.

By the early 70s, it was everywhere. Sears and Spiegel catalogues sold macramé starter kits by the thousand. Bookshop shelves carried bestsellers like Macramé Gnomes and Puppets (a real book, I promise) and Macramé: Creative Design in Knotting. Teen magazines ran friendship-bracelet tutorials between the horoscope and the quizzes. And in living rooms from California to Copenhagen to Brisbane, a whole new aesthetic took hold — earth tones, natural fibres, organic shapes, and the unmistakable silhouette of a trailing spider plant held aloft in a knotted jute cradle.

The jute plant hanger is the piece of the decade, honestly. Pair that with the new houseplant obsession — spider plants, pothos, ferns, philodendrons — and suddenly every middle-class living room had a tiny jungle suspended at head height. The other icon? The macramé owl wall hanging, all flat-knot body with wooden bead eyes, staring gently down over millions of sofas and beds. Plus jute belts, fringe vests, headbands, purses, entire curtain panels. The 70s did not do subtle.

If you want to make your own take on the decade-defining piece, start with my 5 Ways to Start a Plant Hanger guide — the techniques are basically the same ones grandma used in 1974, just with a handful of modern refinements so yours looks a bit less macramé-owl and a bit more boho-dream. 🪴

Macramé in the 21st Century — The Pinterest & Instagram Renaissance

After a quiet stretch through the 80s, 90s and 2000s — a lot of macramé boxed up in attics, honestly — the second great revival arrived around 2015. Only this time the engine wasn't sailors or a queen or a Sears catalogue. It was social media. Pinterest, Instagram and (a bit later) TikTok turned out to be weirdly perfect for macramé. A beautifully made wall hanging is basically custom-designed for a square Instagram feed — textured, tactile, tonal, lit in warm afternoon daylight. It just photographs like a dream.

The numbers from this revival are, frankly, bonkers. #macrame has passed 20 million posts on Instagram. Etsy macramé listings grew roughly 300% between 2018 and 2022. #macrametiktok has cleared 500 million views, with short-form knot tutorials pulling Gen Z into the craft one 60-second video at a time. Throw in Coachella, boho wedding decor, and the whole biophilic-design movement (plants, natural fibres, earthy textures — basically "bring nature inside"), and macramé's cultural moment has legs.

A whole new wave of macramé brands rose up to meet this revival. I started Bochiknot in 2018 from Toronto, Canada, for exactly this reason — I wanted makers to have access to premium cord, clear modern tutorials, and the tools to turn a saved Pinterest pin into something they'd actually finished. Loads of other independent studios and cord suppliers popped up across North America, Europe and Australia at the same time, and together we've built what's now a $50M+ global cottage-craft economy. All from four little knots.

Stylistically, the modern revival feels quite different from the 70s. Where 70s macramé leaned dense, earthy, and chunky in jute, today's look is more pared-back — minimalist, neutral, almost fine-art. Natural cottons in cream, white, pale grey and soft pastels dominate. Wall hangings have gone big (sometimes whole-wall-big), and designers treat macramé less as decorative fringe and more as a proper sculptural medium. The same 13th-century knots, just dressed differently for 2026.

Macramé Around the World — Parallel Knotting Traditions

Here's something I find genuinely lovely — while the lineage we call "macramé" leads back to the Arab world, decorative knotting is basically a human universal. Pretty much every culture that ever had cord or rope invented its own knot-craft, and some of them are just as old and just as beautiful. Here are four of my favourite parallel traditions to know about.

Visual Timeline — 800 Years of Macramé

If we laid all 800 years out on a table, it'd look something like this — from those 13th-century Arab weavers to today's global cottage-craft economy. Each little dot is a turning point where macramé did something interesting.

Famous Macramé Moments in Pop Culture

Six little cultural moments that nudged macramé out of quiet craft circles and into everyone's feed.

The Knots That Built 800 Years of History

Here's something remarkable: the knots themselves haven't really changed. The four foundational knots used by 13th-century Arab weavers are the same four every Bochiknot student learns today. Tutorials have modernised. Cord has modernised. But the actual hand-motions have been passed down, virtually untouched, for 800 years.

These four knots have remained virtually unchanged for 800 years.

Eight hundred years on, the most popular project in the macramé revival is still the humble wall hanging — and choosing the right starting and finishing knots is what separates a good one from a stunning one. If you want to make your first, here's my full guide to 7 ways to start and 7 ways to end a macramé wall hanging.

Why Macramé Matters Today

It would be easy to write off macramé's current revival as "just another Pinterest trend" — but if you look at why the craft is resonating with makers in 2026, a deeper pattern emerges. Macramé is part of a broader cultural reaction against fast, digital, disposable everything. It's slow craft in a TikTok-speed world. It's handmade in a mass-produced world. It's natural fibre in a synthetic world. That's not a coincidence — it's the same reason sourdough baking, vinyl records, and film photography are having their own parallel revivals.

The mental-wellbeing angle is also real. Tying the same four knots over and over is genuinely meditative — repetitive, tactile, hand-led, and absent a screen. Occupational therapists increasingly recommend macramé alongside knitting and cross-stitch for anxiety, ADHD, and stress management. The craft asks you to slow down and pay attention, and for many makers that's precisely the point.

There's also a sustainability thread running through the modern revival. Most macramé cord is natural cotton, recycled cotton, or jute — biodegradable, non-synthetic, and often produced by small suppliers rather than mass manufacturers. A handmade wall hanging is the opposite of fast fashion: it's made once, loved for decades, and often passed on.

Finally — and this is the part I find most moving — macramé is creating intergenerational connection. I've lost count of the number of students who tell me their grandmother made macramé in the 70s and they still have her owl wall hanging somewhere in a box. Teaching the same four knots their grandmother used is a small, deeply human way of keeping a line open across generations. That's not something Pinterest invented. That's 800 years of knots doing what they've always done: connecting human hands across time.

Nicole's Favourite Modern Macramé Books

Honestly? Some of my best knotting afternoons have started with a cup of tea and one of these open on my lap. If you want to go deeper into macramé — or just flip through something gorgeous on a rainy Sunday — these three books are the ones I reach for again and again.

These are Amazon affiliate links — if you buy one I get a few cents, which helps keep Bochiknot's tutorials free for everyone. No pressure though; your library probably has them too.

Start Your Own Macramé Journey

If this history has left you wanting to tie your first Lark's Head, there's no better place to start than my full beginner video. I walk you through cord, tools, and your first few knots from scratch — no prior experience needed.

Planning a larger project? Our 4mm bulk cord roll on Amazon is the same cord I use for wall hangings — and our Golden Ratio cord formula will tell you exactly how much to buy.

Frequently Asked Questions About the History of Macramé

📖 Quick glossary — terms from the history of macramé

Macramé

The art of tying decorative knots by hand, with no needle, hook, or loom.

Miqramah

Arabic for "fringe" or "ornamental veil" — the most likely root of the word "macramé."

Zhongguo Jie (中国结)

The Chinese decorative knotting tradition, dating to the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE).

Quipu

Knotted cords used by pre-Columbian Andean civilisations — including the Inca — for record-keeping and mathematics.

Lark's Head Knot

A simple attachment knot used to mount cord to a ring, dowel, or clasp. The opening move of nearly every macramé piece, past or present.

Sylvia's Book of Macramé Lace

Seminal 1882 how-to published in London that brought macramé into Victorian homes worldwide.

McNamara's lace

Sailor slang for especially intricate decorative knot-work produced at sea during long voyages.

Biophilic design

A modern design philosophy that emphasises natural materials, plants, and organic forms in interior spaces — closely linked to macramé's current revival.

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