Gnarly Void

Shocked Pikachu

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The shocked Pikachu meme, as a rug.

The whole face is one flat field of yellow, cut to the silhouette so the ears reach up and out past any frame. There is almost nothing inside it: two round black eyes, a dot of a nose, a small pink mouth held open, and the red cheeks sitting low and wide. The black ear tips and the heavy contour around the outside are the only other marks.

Everything hinges on the eyes. Each one carries a single white loop, set slightly off center, and that off-center placement is the entire expression. Move it a few tufts and the face is calm. Where it is now, the face is caught.

The pile keeps the yellow uneven enough that it does not read as a print, and the mouth and cheeks pick up a little shadow along their edges where the color changes. The cut edge is where the tufting shows most, with the black backing outline pulled a little rough around the ears.

It is a joke that has been repeated a few million times, made slowly by hand out of yarn. That is probably the funniest version of it.

Sploot Seal

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A seal at full sploot.

Grey pile takes up most of the frame, broad and soft-edged, with the cream face and belly opening a lighter shape through the middle. The flippers stretch out at either end, the body settles heavily into the canvas, and a handful of dark patches drift across the coat like loose marks on a drawing.

The face does the quiet work. Two black eyes catch small white flashes, while the whiskers and nose stay deliberately simple. A heavy black outline keeps the silhouette readable even as the pile softens every edge inside it.

It is an uncomplicated subject, but the scale changes the feeling. A seal's compact body becomes a whole field of grey, something you could lie down beside as easily as hang on a wall. The cartoon is still there; the yarn gives it weight, warmth, and a very convincing place to sploot.

Peace Bloom

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A peace sign built into a flower.

The petals gather in uneven layers of turquoise, teal, and deep blue, each one outlined in black and pulled slightly out of alignment. At the center, a red peace symbol sits cleanly inside a cream field. The familiar mark is oversized enough to become the flower's structure rather than an emblem placed on top.

The pile does most of the shading. Short loops catch the light differently as the petals turn, while the heavy outlines keep the separate pieces legible from a distance. The red and cream hold the middle open while the cool petals push outward around them.

It lands somewhere between flower, badge, and sign. Soft material, hard geometry, and a symbol that gives the whole thing its rhythm.

Lugia

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lugia, suspended between flight and the wall.

The wings take up almost the whole frame, broad and slightly uneven as if the creature has just pulled them in. The head and neck sit low between them, with the long tail curling down and back into the body. White, grey, and purple separate the planes without turning the image into a flat stack of color; the black outline gives every feathered shape somewhere to stop.

The useful tension is between the subject's weight and its posture. This is a large, dense rug, but Lugia is drawn as if it should be moving through air. The tufted loops catch the light differently across each section, so the wings read as volume while the heavy contour keeps the silhouette immediate from across the room. The white catches the light first, the greys settle the middle, and the purples give the shadows somewhere to deepen.

The work stays recognizable as a Pokémon illustration, but the material changes the speed of it. Flight becomes something thick, soft, and fixed in place.

Homer in the Bushes

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A tufted Homer caught halfway back into a wall of green.

The face is all eyes and warm color, pressed into a narrow opening between two heavy banks of pile. The surrounding green is shaggy and irregular, more like foliage than a background. It closes around him from every side as he makes his quiet retreat.

The cartoon geometry stays clean underneath the texture, but the loops refuse to behave like a flat illustration. It is the classic Homer backing into the bushes moment translated into fiber: part character, part hiding place, a small bright interruption in a very overgrown field.

How I Ended Up With a 28" Bowl of Tufted Ramen

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to try making 3D fiber foods, and I decided the first one should be a bowl of ramen. Not a flat ramen rug, which is the obvious version and the one you've probably already seen a hundred of. I wanted the actual thing: separate ingredients, built individually, assembled into a physical bowl you could look down into. Eggs. Chashu. Nori. Naruto. Green onion. Noodles. Broth. A bowl to hold all of it.

I got there. The finished bowl is about 28 by 28 by 12 inches. That was not the plan. There was, arguably, never a plan, which is sort of the whole point of this post.

Building the pantry</h2>
The appeal of doing it as separate parts is that each ingredient gets to be its own little tufting problem. An egg is not a nori is not a scallion. They want different pile heights, different materials, different construction entirely.
So I started making ingredients the way you'd stock a pantry, one at a time, not really thinking about the finished dish yet.

The egg halves are tufted, cream white with the soft yellow center. The chashu is its own tufted piece. The naruto is the fun one, a white disc with the pink spiral swirled into it, which reads instantly as fish cake to anyone who's ever eaten ramen and reads as nothing at all to everyone else. The nori is long, shaggy, dark green pile, deliberately textured so it looks like a limp sheet of seaweed instead of a rug.
The green onions are flat tufted strips, folded lengthwise and sewn into rings, so they're actually dimensional little tubes instead of drawn-on lines. The noodles are tufted too, but shaped into long rounded coils rather than left flat, so they sit in the bowl as rounded noodle forms instead of reading as stripes on a floor. And under everything there's a tufted broth lining, plus the bowl itself, which has tufted exterior walls over a wood skeleton.
I used AI a lot through this. Not to make anything, obviously, wool is still extremely a hands problem, but to brainstorm. Shapes, proportions, what material wants to do what, rough dimensions for each ingredient so they'd all agree with each other. It's genuinely good at that. You can think out loud and get a reasonable answer back fast.
Which is where the trouble started, though it didn't look like trouble at the time.

The nori incident</h2>
Early on, we'd been talking through dimensions, and I made the nori about a foot long.
One foot. On a screen, in a chat window, next to a bunch of other numbers, one foot is an unremarkable measurement. It's a ruler. It's a sub sandwich. Nobody reads "12 inches" and flinches.
Then you actually tuft a one-foot piece of seaweed and cut it out and hold it up.

That is a large piece of seaweed. That is a piece of seaweed with presence. And the thing is, I saw that, and I registered that it was big, and I did not stop.
I want to be honest about the failure here because it's the interesting part. The mistake wasn't the nori. The mistake was what I did after the nori, which was: keep going.

One reasonable step at a time</h2>
Here's how the whole thing actually escalated, and every link in this chain felt completely sensible while I was standing in it.
The nori already existed, at a foot long. So the eggs needed to look right next to the nori, which meant the eggs got sized up to match. Then the chashu had to sit believably next to the eggs, so it grew too. The naruto had to work with the chashu. The green onions had to make sense scattered over all of it. And once I had a foot of nori and eggs to match and chashu to match those and a fish cake scaled to the chashu and onions scaled to everything, all of that had to go into a bowl, and the bowl had to be big enough to hold it.

At no point did I decide to make an enormous bowl of ramen. I never had that thought. Every single component was a locally correct response to the components that already existed. It was reasonable all the way down. By the time I stepped back and looked at the whole system, the scale wasn't a decision I could make anymore. It was a constraint I'd already inherited from myself.
Starting over meant throwing out a real pile of finished tufting, all of which was fine work, none of which was wrong on its own terms. Continuing meant building a genuinely ridiculous bowl.
I continued. Obviously I continued.

The part where this is about AI, a little</h2>
I don't want to oversell this, because the tidy version of this story is a lie. The AI was not sitting there feeding me absurd answers while I nodded along. Most of the individual suggestions were fine. Reasonable in isolation, or reasonable relative to the constraints we'd already established. The arithmetic was correct. The problem is that nobody in this loop, me or the model, was consistently zooming out to check the entire physical system against reality. We were both answering the question in front of us.
If you've built anything with AI, this should feel familiar. A model will happily give you a clean function, correctly implement the feature you asked for, do the math right, and solve exactly the narrow problem you handed it, while the larger premise is quietly wrong. The function is good. The feature works. The architecture is nonsense. Nothing in the local output tells you that, because locally, nothing is wrong.
So verification can't just be "is this output internally correct." You also have to verify the model of the problem. Does this thing belong here at all. Are the assumptions from three steps ago still true. Are we optimizing the right number. Does this measurement mean diameter or circumference. Am I, right now, tufting a one-foot piece of seaweed.
That diameter-versus-circumference one isn't hypothetical, incidentally. There was some genuine confusion about exactly that while I was working out the bowl, and it's the same lesson wearing a different hat. Perfectly correct arithmetic is worthless if you're computing the wrong quantity. A number can be right and mean nothing.
And to be clear, I'm not letting myself off the hook and blaming the robot. The human is half of this feedback loop. I accepted plausible answers and kept moving, because plausible answers are comfortable and moving forward feels like progress. The failure mode that's actually worth naming isn't "the AI was dumb." It's the interaction: a system that faithfully answers each question, plus a person who keeps building without ever validating the whole.

Wool has a much worse undo</h2>
The reason this landed as hard as it did is that fiber work has a brutal feedback loop compared to software.
In code I can compile, run the tests, read the diff, revert, regenerate, delete the whole implementation and start over before lunch. The cost of being wrong is usually minutes.

To find out a tufted ingredient is too big, I first have to design it, project or draw it onto the tufting cloth, tuft the entire thing, glue and back it, cut it out, and finish the edges. Only then do I get to hold it in my hands and discover it's enormous. Wool has a considerably worse undo function. There's no ctrl-z on a yard of finished pile. There's just a decision about whether the sunk cost is worth eating.
That's what made the verification problem so physical here. In software the gap between "wrong assumption" and "consequence" can be small enough to ignore. In fiber, the gap is a full afternoon of tufting, which is exactly long enough to commit you to the mistake.


The bowl itself is a wood skeleton, a plywood ring with vertical posts, wrapped in a black tufted lining on the inside and the cream tufted wall on the outside. Building the frame is when the number stopped being abstract. You can hand-wave a big tufted egg. You cannot hand-wave a plywood ring that no longer fits comfortably on the workbench.

The mistake made it better</h2>
The scaling accident made the piece better, which is inconvenient for anyone hoping this ends in a tidy lesson about measuring twice.
I would never have deliberately sat down to design a 28-inch bowl of ramen. It's too much. If I'd verified the scale up front like a responsible person, I'd have built something sane and correct and a lot less interesting. Following the existing scale instead of fighting it pushed the whole thing somewhere stranger and more sculptural than I'd have chosen on purpose. It stopped being a ramen-themed rug and turned into an actual mixed-media object.
And the size is what forced the construction to get honest. Because it's big, each part had to solve its own problem instead of everything being flattened into one tufted plane. It's mostly tufting throughout, but the tufting had to do different things: flat graphic pile for the eggs, chashu, and naruto, long shaggy pile for the nori, strips folded and sewn into rings for the scallions, coils shaped into rounded forms for the noodles. Then plywood for the skeleton, because nothing soft was going to hold that shape.




Above is roughly where it is now, 28 by 28 by 12 inches of it. My hand's in there for scale in one of these and it is not reassuring.
Verification still matters. I genuinely should have stepped back and sanity-checked the scale before the nori set the pace for everything else, and the fact that it worked out doesn't retroactively make skipping that step smart. The thing worth carrying over to code is narrow: know when you're trusting a stack of locally correct answers without ever validating the system they add up to. That's the failure, and it happens to seaweed and software about equally.
But also, sometimes you've already made the one-foot nori. And once you've made the one-foot nori, you might as well build the fucking bowl.

Discourse

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A logo that lives on a screen, moved into a room.

This is the Discourse mark - the speech bubble made of nested colored arcs, red through blue, wrapped in a heavy black field. It's a shape I look at every day; Discourse is where I work. Tufting it is a small act of translation: taking something that exists as a vector on a login page and giving it pile, weight, and a wall to hang on.

The build is the good part, and it goes in from the inside out. The cream bubble first, then each color laid around it as its own ring - orange, red, green, blue - and finally the black poured in around the whole thing to make the field. The second image is the whole thing coming together, stage by stage. Watching a logo assemble in yarn is oddly satisfying; it's the same shape the whole way, just gaining substance.

The black surround does the heavy lifting. It's most of the piece by area and none of the interest, which is exactly its job - a flat dark field that makes the little rainbow of arcs sit forward and glow. Tufting that much black is a slog with no feedback; you're just filling, and the payoff only shows up once the last of the canvas disappears.

Software doesn't usually get to be a physical object. This one does now, on a wall, under warm light, being exactly what it always was and never could be.

Loaded II

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every die needs a partner.

This is the black one - deep black pile, cream pips, dense foam core - the exact inverse of Loaded</a>. Same scale, same cube, same Angine de Poitrine black-and-white world; the colors just trade places. Set the two together and they read as a pair before they read as dice: one dark, one light, stacked on the couch like they've always lived there.

The inversion changes how the pips work. On the cream die the black dots do the talking; here the cream pips are the only light in a field of black, so they carry more - little bright knots you find by eye and by hand. Tufting black-on-black for the body meant leaning entirely on form and shadow, since color gives you nothing.

Same honest core as its sibling: foam, not stuffing. Press in and it gives, then shoves back and keeps its corners. A cube wants edges, pile wants to round them off, and the foam holds the argument in the middle so the thing stays crisp across the room and soft under a hand.

Two dice now, black and white, waiting to be thrown. One was never going to be enough - a single die is a number, but a pair is a game.

Deck 001 & Deck 002

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two decks for a show, tufted instead of painted.

These went into a group skateboard deck show at ADX Portland</a>, the maker studio I'm a member of. The brief is the deck shape - that long rounded pill everyone knows - and what you do inside it is yours. I did what I always do: I reached for yarn instead of paint.

Deck 001, on the left, is monochrome and hard-edged - cream, grays, and black cut into arcs, blocks, and angular shards, a little cubist, a little Bauhaus. It's the more structural of the two: the composition does the work, and the palette stays out of its way.

Deck 002 is the opposite instinct. Vertical bands of cream, rust, orange, gold, and brown running the length of the deck, a warm sunset laid down in stripes. No drawing, just color doing all the talking - the earth-tone cousin of the traffic-light and Birdhaus pieces.

Same shape, two grammars: one that composes and one that glows. Hung side by side on the same wall, they read as a conversation - which is the fun of making two for one show instead of one.

A skateboard is built to be ridden and scuffed. These are built to be touched and hung. Same silhouette, opposite fate.

Loaded

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The oldest random number generator, rebuilt as an object with opinions.

A die at many times scale, tufted in deep cream pile with black pips over a dense foam core. Six up top, five on the face. The form could not be simpler - a cube and some circles - and that's what makes it work: dice are pure geometry with rules attached, and scaling one up in fiber keeps the geometry, the rules, and the game.

The piece is a nod to Angine de Poitrine, a band I love whose whole visual world runs on dice and black-and-white. This is that aesthetic made physical: monochrome, blunt, a little absurd, sitting on the couch like it owns the place.

The core is the honest part. Dense foam, not stuffing - press into the pile and the surface gives, but the cube pushes back and holds its corners. A cube asks for edges, pile wants to round everything off, and the foam is what lets both win: crisp enough to read as a die across the room, soft enough that reading it up close means touching it.

And it rolls. Underhand, across the floor, tumbling in slow motion and landing with a soft thud and a verdict. Every die promises a fair result; this one just takes its time delivering.

Drake

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The wing is carved. That changes everything.

Most tufted work earns its depth through pile alone; here the drake's wing rides over the body in sculpted relief, so the bird actually stands off the wall. Cream shoulder, brown coverts, the blue speculum flashing between black and white bars - the one part of a mallard that looks designed gets the most dimensional treatment.

Behind him the scene goes cubist: a red sun scored with black rules, gray-green bands of horizon, a ground plane shattered into blue and gray triangles. The bird is all field-guide fidelity - bottle-green head, white collar, chestnut breast, orange feet - standing in a landscape that gave up on realism entirely. He doesn't seem to mind.

A sculpted cream border traces the whole silhouette and squares it off, part frame, part halo, keeping the composition one object instead of a bird pasted on a backdrop.

Drake holds the tension between taxidermy and toy - anatomically earnest, structurally playful, a specimen mounted in a world made of shapes.

He's a piece in the Birdhaus</a> series - forms over feathers - the red sun and its black bars carried from screen into pile.

Penrose

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An impossible object, made real.

The Penrose triangle only exists as a drawing - three beams that meet at right angles no physical object could hold. Tufting it is a small act of defiance: taking a shape that cannot exist and giving it high-pile texture, weight, and a place to hang on a wall.

The whole illusion rides on value. There's no trick geometry here, just three faces in light gray, mid gray, and near-black, and the eye does the rest - reading the gradient as light falling across surfaces that fold impossibly into each other. Flatten the color and the magic collapses; it's the tonal shift that keeps the beams turning.

Tufted with dense, even pile, the hard edges of the figure stay crisp while the surface goes soft and inviting. Precision holds the shape; texture makes you want to touch the thing your eyes insist can't be there.

Penrose is a study in contradiction - rigid and plush, flat and dimensional, impossible and hanging right in front of you.

Signal

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Stop. Slow down. Go!

A tufted traffic light.

Bowlhaus I

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A study in form, balance, and bold reduction.

This Bauhaus-inspired owl distills the subject down to its essential geometry - circles, arcs, and color blocks arranged with intention. The symmetry is almost mechanical, but the oversized eyes and softened edges keep it firmly in the realm of character.

Primary colors anchor the composition against a deep black field, giving it that classic Bauhaus tension: function versus expression, system versus personality. The eyes pull you in immediately - equal parts alert, curious, and slightly surreal.

Tufted with thick, high-pile texture, the rigid geometry breaks just enough at the edges to remind you this is still fiber, still handmade. Precision meets softness.

Bowlhaus sits somewhere between mascot and modernist study - a minimal owl that feels both engineered and alive.

A 3 foot tufted stick of RAM

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A tufted textile recreation of a computer RAM stick, crafted with surprising technical accuracy. The piece features a green circuit board base with yellow contact pins running along the bottom edge. The memory chips are represented by alternating rectangles in cream, navy blue, and light mint colors, arranged in the characteristic symmetric pattern of RAM modules. Yellow dots above the chips mimic capacitors or other surface-mount components. Two circular elements cap each end--one in bright yellow, one in navy blue--representing mounting hardware or heat spreaders.

The attention to detail extends to the actual layout: the chips and components are positioned where they'd actually appear on a real DDR4 or DDR5 module. Made with short cut pile on a green tufted background.

This piece takes something typically invisible and hyper-abstract (system memory) and forces it into the physical world at an exaggerated scale. A stick of RAM, but oversized, tactile, and slow.

It's a nod to the infrastructure layer that underpins everything we're building right now. Models, agents, orchestration layers - all of it ultimately collapses down into memory, allocation, and throughput. This rug turns that hidden dependency into something you can actually see, touch, and trip over.

There's a bit of humor in it too. RAM is expensive, so naturally the solution is to tuft your own. But beneath that is a quieter idea: we're increasingly surrounded by systems we don't physically interact with anymore. This piece pulls one of those systems back into human scale.

A tribute, or maybe an offering, to the machines.

Process</h3>

Materials</h3>

A wavy, blue, framebreaking tufted fiber piece

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A study in movement and restraint, this tufted piece uses a sequence of flowing, offset waves to create depth without relying on hard contrast. The palette moves from deep cobalt through pale mint into soft seafoam and gray, evoking water, erosion, and layered natural forms. Its irregular silhouette breaks away from the traditional rectangular rug, allowing the composition to expand outward and feel uncontained. The result is a tactile, sculptural surface that shifts with light and perspective - somewhere between landscape and motion captured in fiber.

Not a Nott I

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A geometric study in wool inspired by the textile compositions of David Nott</a>. Blocks, arcs, and circles interlock like architectural elements, forming a small landscape of structure and balance.

Not a Nott is a geometric tufted composition built from circles, arcs, and modular blocks arranged within a heavy black grid.

Bold outlines divide color and texture into architectural shapes. Rust, sand, ochre, and stone tones create a warm, grounded palette while the varying pile directions and densities give the surface a tactile depth.

The composition feels structured but playful - part stained glass window, part abstract map, part mechanical diagram. Circles anchor the design while rectangular forms create rhythm and movement throughout the frame.

It is a nod to the influence, but intentionally not a reproduction.

Not a Nott.

Drippy, fluid, and carved green fiber piece

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This hand-tufted rug explores organic movement through layered green tones and sculpted pile. Deep forest green "drips" cascade over lighter mint and cream shapes, creating a fluid, melting effect that feels both natural and surreal. The carved texture enhances the dimensional look, giving the piece a soft topographic quality where colors appear to flow into one another.
Multiple shades of green create depth and contrast, while the high-low tufting and hand carving emphasize the dripping forms. The result is a sculptural textile that blurs the line between rug and wall art.
Inspired by liquid motion, mossy landscapes, and experimental fiber design, this piece works equally well as a small statement rug or as textured fiber art for a wall.

Damn Zippy inspired bird tattoo fiber art

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by more tattoo art, this piece features a colorful bird. It was originally drawn and tattooed by Olive aka Damn Zippy. Check her out here</a>

Traditional tattoo inspired flower fiber piece

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A hand-tufted rug inspired by traditional tattoo flash.
This piece features a bold five-petal flower with a bright yellow center, saturated red petals, and heavy black outlines. The white halo gives the design breathing room, while the deep green leaves ground it with contrast and balance.
Built with thick pile and sharp color blocking, it's designed to read clearly from a distance and feel plush up close. The sculpted silhouette follows the leaves and petals, turning the graphic into a functional object.
Classic flash energy, translated into fiber.

Abstract Dreamsicle

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Exploring softness as structure.
Layered pastel forms drift and overlap, anchored by a dense, warm base that grounds the composition. Rounded protrusions interrupt the surface like half-remembered details, inviting touch as much as inspection.
I spent extra time trimming and shearing this one. I wanted the layers to look like they were on top of each other and had "depth".

Yarn Wall

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Between weaving, crocheting, and now tufting, we have a decent collection of yarn going. We had been storing it stacked up in a tight little Ikea shelf but that made it hard to sort and see what we had. I saw this idea online and thought it was great because it both functions and looks good. This doesn't quite cover quite all the fiber supply but it handles a lot of it. We are considering one more board on the wall adjacent the right board.
Process</h3>
First, I built some simple frames out of 1x2s. I did this to give the pegboard some "depth" to allow for the pegs to stay in place. I could have used nylon spacers but went this route instead. After that, I screwed the pegboards on top of this frame. Then I flipped it over and attached 3 tooth hangers on each. I hung these using drywall anchors because there was no stud perfectly where we wanted it. With 3 hangers spreading out the load, I'm confident it should stay put.
Materials</h3>

1x2s</li>
pegboards - (2) 2' x 4'</li>
screws

#8 - 1 1/2" (for the frame)</li>
#6 - 1" (attaching pegboard to frame)</li> </ul> </li> </ul>

NYC MTA G Train fiber piece

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This piece is dedicated to the G train in New York City.
The G is an odd line. It does not touch Manhattan. It runs quietly through Brooklyn and Queens, connecting places that feel adjacent but rarely centered. It is often overlooked, often delayed, and deeply relied on by the people who use it every day.
Rendered in soft fiber, the familiar green circle becomes tactile and slow. What is usually signage and schedule turns into something physical - dense, imperfect, and worn at the edges. The letterform holds its shape, but only just. The pile absorbs sharpness. The symbol becomes an object.
Like the train itself, this piece is about persistence rather than spectacle. About movement that happens off to the side. About systems that are lived in more than they are noticed.
A transit mark translated into texture.

Glazed Pottery - Batch 2

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is now my second batch of glazed pottery. I'm definitely seeing improvements with my shaping and consistency. I was disappointed in a few of the overlapping glaze experiments I tried but that's how you learn. At this point, I think I have enough pots and experience that I can start to get a little pickier with what I send to fire. I have a bunch of pinch pots that got bisque fired that I hope to glaze fire and show soon.

Color Experiment #1

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What started out as an experiment with a random yarn color I found turned into a fiber piece with a blast of color that I love. It gives me 90s psychadelic vibes.

A Tribute to My Lord and Savior, Vyvanse

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A blue and white capsule inspired by Vyvanse. I was diagnosed later in life and this medicine has improved my life in ways I couldn't imagine. I used to think I was just lazy or apathethic, but turns out my brain just functions differently.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard Alligator Fiber Art

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Process</h3>
I'm a big fan of King Gizz and wanted to create a piece inspired by them. The alligator is available in a simple 2d outline that was perfect for tufting. I decided to mount it on a thin piece of birch that I painted bright purple. I got the paint in the samples section for $2 and I think it provides a perfect backdrop.
This is an early piece so there are still some rough edges. The top of the back could have been a thicker outline. I also chose not to give it pupils as I didn't think it would look very good as a small dot of yarn.
Materials</h3>
Yarn

acrylic</li> </ul>
Wood

birch</li> </ul>

Geometric Color Block Hand-tufted Rug

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Process</h3>
Started this as a wall hanging. Tufted the top left black square first, then added the center squares. Halfway through I got a new long pile tufting machine and decided to pivot it into a rug instead. You can see the longer pile in the beige corners - that's where I started using the new machine. The rest is shorter pile from the original wall hanging plan.
Materials</h3>
Yarn:

Acrylic</li>
Wool</li> </ul>

Glazed pottery - Batch 1

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Process</h3>
Slab built by hand
Materials</h3>
Clay from Georgie's:

White Salmon with Speckles</li>
Trail Mix</li>
Timberline</li> </ul>
Various glazes

Vulfmon-inspired Black, Silver, Gold, and White Wall Weaving

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by a piece seen in a Vulfmon video
Process</h3>
Materials</h3>

About

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Gnarly Void is an maker site centered on creating physical objects by hand. The work spans clay, fiber, wood, and mixed materials, with each piece emerging from long stretches of focused, uninterrupted making.
I call these works voids because of how they are made. A void is a state of attention where time compresses, external noise falls away, and the act of making becomes the only thing that exists. Inside that space, materials are allowed to lead. Decisions are slow. Imperfections are left visible.
The process matters as much as the outcome. These pieces are not designed to be mass-produced or optimized for scale. They are shaped through repetition, experimentation, and listening to what the material wants to do rather than forcing it into a fixed result.
Gnarly Void exists to hold that work. Finished pieces, works in progress, and occasional one-off experiments all live here. The practice is guided by a simple idea: tuning the silence into a harmony of matter.
If you are drawn to handmade art, tactile objects, and work that values process over polish, you are in the right place.

Mondrian-esque Purple, Gold, and Black Hand-tufted Rug

site@gnarlyvoid.com (Jake Goldsborough) — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My first rug. I recently got a tufting machine and wanted to start simple. The black square came first, then I decided to add a few rows of purple. After that, I decided a gold border would look good.

Gnarly Void

Shocked Pikachu

Sploot Seal

Peace Bloom

Lugia

Homer in the Bushes

How I Ended Up With a 28" Bowl of Tufted Ramen

Discourse

Loaded II

Deck 001 & Deck 002

Loaded

Drake

Penrose

Signal

Bowlhaus I

A 3 foot tufted stick of RAM

Process</h3>

Materials</h3>

A wavy, blue, framebreaking tufted fiber piece

Not a Nott I

Drippy, fluid, and carved green fiber piece

Damn Zippy inspired bird tattoo fiber art

Traditional tattoo inspired flower fiber piece

Abstract Dreamsicle

Yarn Wall

Materials</h3> 1x2s</li> pegboards - (2) 2' x 4'</li> screws #8 - 1 1/2" (for the frame)</li> #6 - 1" (attaching pegboard to frame)</li> </ul> </li> </ul>

NYC MTA G Train fiber piece

Glazed Pottery - Batch 2

Color Experiment #1

A Tribute to My Lord and Savior, Vyvanse

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard Alligator Fiber Art

Materials</h3> Yarn</p> acrylic</li> </ul> Wood</p> birch</li> </ul>

Geometric Color Block Hand-tufted Rug

Materials</h3> Yarn:</p> Acrylic</li> Wool</li> </ul>

Glazed pottery - Batch 1

Process</h3> Slab built by hand</p>

Materials</h3> Clay from Georgie's:</p> White Salmon with Speckles</li> Trail Mix</li> Timberline</li> </ul> Various glazes</p>

Vulfmon-inspired Black, Silver, Gold, and White Wall Weaving

Process</h3>

Materials</h3>

About

Mondrian-esque Purple, Gold, and Black Hand-tufted Rug

Materials</h3>

1x2s</li>
pegboards - (2) 2' x 4'</li>
screws

#8 - 1 1/2" (for the frame)</li>
#6 - 1" (attaching pegboard to frame)</li> </ul> </li> </ul>

Materials</h3>
Yarn</p>

acrylic</li> </ul>
Wood</p>

birch</li> </ul>

Materials</h3>
Yarn:</p>

Acrylic</li>
Wool</li> </ul>

Process</h3>
Slab built by hand</p>

Materials</h3>
Clay from Georgie's:</p>

White Salmon with Speckles</li>
Trail Mix</li>
Timberline</li> </ul>
Various glazes</p>