Make My Day Camp: How to Make a Hemp Dog Necklace

Monday, January 3, 2022

How to Make a Hemp Dog Necklace

This is a rerun from 2018 - Sarge still wears the collar, and the tag still makes me laugh! My worst nightmare is a funny dog tag :) I don't call it a 'collar' cuz I'm way too paranoid to use this as anything other than a necklace for decorating the dog hahaha!!

I bought this dog tag while in Tennessee last week because it made me laugh (and it's also very fitting!), when I added it to Sarge's collar tho he jingled like a cat and was driving me (and him) batty...so while camping I made him a hemp macrame collar to hang it from. And because one thing leads to another, I brought some letter beads with me to also add his name to the new collar (actually it's a necklace not a collar - just like the last one I made, click here for that post, there is no way this can function as his collar...it's just decorative).

This isn't hard to do at all and it comes together quickly. I didn't do any special knots or design, just square knots and you can google for instructions on how to make them. For a 14" collar I cut one piece of hemp (bought a ball of it at Walmart for like 5 bucks) approximately 36" long, and another one approx. 7 yards (I say approximately because I don't have a ruler in the RV so measured lengths by holding the end at my nose and stretching my arm out to the side as far as it'll go - I figure that's about 3 feet). Find the middle of each of the lengths and holding them together make a loop and knot it about an inch down. That's one end of the collar. I clip the loop to the top of a piece of cardboard (or a thin cutting board is what I used this time), and clip the 2 short ends to the bottom of the board - clipping the ends down makes it way easier to tie the knots. Then make square knots for 12 inches and finish by tying a big knot in the other end that will slip thru the loop at the beginning (the loop and knot are the closure). If you want to add beads or a charm, slide them onto the two short ends and make the knots around the beads with the long ends - I added them so they'd be at about the halfway point of the collar.