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Tufted Joy

With wool dyed to match her imagination’s palette, Melissa Monroe creates rugs, furniture-inspired sculptures, and objects filled with life.

By Emily Freidenrich
August 6, 2025

Melissa Monroe surrounded by tufted works in in her Portland, Oregon, studio.
Photo by Melissa Monroe

Melissa Monroe in her Portland, Oregon, studio.

What happens when you mix the cozy craft of rug tufting with the wild imagination of a painter? Picture a mid-century lounge chair sprouting patchwork fur, a bench shaped like a two-headed cat, cubed poufs sided with masklike faces, or a tapestry of a grinning tiger in profile on a mossy green background, surrounded by a striped, shaggy border. These are the work of Portland, Oregon–based multimedia artist Melissa Monroe. In her home studio, repurposed from a 1960s church classroom space, Monroe conjures a menagerie of textile creatures and objects that are as likely to sprawl across a floor as to hang on a wall.

Entirely self-taught, Monroe has been a working artist since 2013, mainly painting, though no medium has been off-limits. She also builds furniture-inspired sculptures, dabbles in ceramics, and makes masks from papier mâché, with which she performs at gallery show openings and in videos posted to her vibrant social media pages. In tufting she found a way for these pursuits to coexist. “The idea of it seemed so magical,” she recalls, “like painting with yarn.”

In 2020 an affordable tufting gun hit the market. Before long, cheery rugs and wall hangings in geometric patterns and fluffy emoji-like designs were all over RugTok (TikTok for rugs and tufting, naturally) and Etsy shops galore. But when Monroe spotted a lusciously drippy rainbow stair runner by tufting genius Trish Andersen, she “felt a rush” of inspiration. “I immediately saw all these things that I wanted to do with it that no one else was doing yet.” Monroe had taken an upholstery class and saw a throughline of possibility between tufting and three-dimensional, functional objects.

While the world stood still in pandemic isolation, Monroe’s art exploded into motion. With tufting gun in hand, she began creating vibrant, tactile sculptures that caught the eye of galleries and art fairs across the country. “Tufting very quickly took over my entire art practice,” she recalls. “Galleries wanted to show it, especially 3D objects. I’d started with rugs for people’s spaces, but it evolved into building masks and incorporating furniture-building techniques.”

Monroe shows her work frequently in Portland galleries, Seattle’s AMcE Creative Arts and Lynn Hanson galleries, and the Seattle Art Fair, as well as HeyThere Projects in Joshua Tree, California, and Mortal Machine in New Orleans.

Vintage chair reupholstered with hand-tufted wool
Photo by Melissa Monroe

Monroe reupholstered a vintage chair with hand-tufted wool to create Candy Scoop, 2024.

Plan like a Tufter, Improvise like a Painter

When painting, Monroe rarely starts with a plan; her process is more like laying down a series of visual beats (she’s also a musician, doing vocals and keyboard for her band, Soft Memory) that build as she works. Tufting though, as she learned early on, requires more up-front planning and preparation. Yarn was the first problem: “I hated all the color choices at the craft stores,” she recalls. “I had a specific vision of the palette I wanted.” Eventually Monroe found a fabricator to dye durable, high-end wool to her painterly specifications, and today she keeps her studio’s covetable wall of color happily overstocked.

Her pieces start with a rough sketch of her object—a rug, a chair, a mask—and a design before she sets tufting gun to tufting cloth. “I love shapes, figurative expression, and vintage stuffed animals,” she says of her imagery. From there, the “painting with yarn” begins. “I get my sense of color, shape, texture, and form from my painting practice,” she says, and that gives her the confidence to let her work emerge organically with punchy visuals, curious creatures, sometimes words, and often lots and lots of color.

Once she gets going, her sense of painterly improvisation kicks in. “As I work, I’ll choose colors and pile height, a lot of it based on past experience of what works and what does not,” she says. “You can get stuck in ideation. If you have the whole thing planned out, there’s no excitement. A plan sets an expectation you’re never going to meet, and a lot of the excitement for me is finding the piece as I go.”

Vintage stool upholstered with tufted wool.
Photo by Melissa Monroe

Perception Circle, 2025, vintage stool upholstered with tufted wool, 23 x 20 x 23 in.

  • Tufted alligator wall hanging
    Photos by Melissa Monroe

    Painful Blanket wall hanging, 2025, tufted wool, 21 x 16 x 2 in.

  • Tufted wool rug with tiger motif

    Tiger’s Rest rug, 2025, tufted wool, 26 x 36 x 2 in.

Art (and Love) in a Coffee Shop

Monroe’s first hint that she could be an artist came in 2012, when she was in her mid-20s, a married mom of three working in a coffee shop to help make ends meet. A muralist was painting a wall in the café, and watching him work and talking with him “blew my mind,” she says. “He didn’t have a plan, he was just layering paint and color. It was so casual, and I just could not wrap my head around it. People paint like this? And this is your job?

Monroe went home that night, scrounged house paint and glass from her contractor husband’s projects plus craft supplies from an old job at Michael’s, and threw them together in an emotional outburst of art. “Making art helped me release a lot of anger that I didn’t realize I had,” she reflects. Her first marriage ended not long after.

She soon earned enough to become a full-time artist, selling her work on eBay to buyers as far-flung as Greece and France. She also kept in touch with the muralist, a local painter named Jesse Reno—and they are still together, 11 years on.

Monroe with her work at the Seattle Art Fair
Photo by Melissa Monroe

Monroe displays her work in the Lynn Hanson Gallery booth at the Seattle Art Fair.

Art and Life

These days, Monroe and Reno work side by side in their shared studio. They’re raising the children (teenagers now) while making music and a lot of art. The pair show together frequently and notice a fond cohesion in color and form—Monroe reads it as a comforting mutual “understanding” in their work.

Monroe and Reno have found a strong and supportive community in the Portland art and music scenes, and Monroe finds ways to give back. “I try to be a resource for people learning and getting into tufting. I’m impressed, looking back, that I got through my first projects, and I enjoy working through new problems and playing with different materials.” She sells her custom yarn as well as tufting supplies, hosts tufting workshops in her studio, and even curated a show of local and national tufting artists dubbed Tuft Crowd at Portland’s Brassworks Gallery.

Monroe is enjoying a busy year of shows, pushing her tufting sculptural work to greater scale, and incorporating playful handmade ceramic elements like little clawed feet. She loves that tufting is fast and allows her to get her ideas out quickly—a “joyful release” for her buzzing inner universe. That energy is palpable in her work: the grinning alligators and languid tigers, the kooky faces peering from a chair cushion, the mélange of textures, the melting rainbow palette. Tufting, for Monroe, is utter joy.

 

Emily Freidenrich is the author of Almost Lost Arts: Traditional Crafts and the Artisans Keeping Them Alive (Chronicle Books, 2019). She lives and works in Seattle.

An in-progress tufted wall hanging in Melissa Monroe’s studio.
Photo by Melissa Monroe

An in-progress tufted wall hanging in Melissa Monroe’s studio.

Visit Melissa Monroe online.

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  • Double-headed alligator bench
    Photos by Melissa Monroe

    Double Trouble, 2025, tufted wool upholstered onto wooden bench, 30 x 18 x 30 in.

  • Lion sculpture made of tufted wool upholstered onto a wooden stool.

    Lion Sculpture, tufted wool upholstered onto a wooden stool, 40 x 16 x 29 in.

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