Make Your Own Earthfriendly Floor Rug
EducationMake Your Own Earthfriendly Floor Rug
The bad news is that your favorite lucky shirt has so many holes you could strain spaghetti with it. The good news is that you can get many more years out of it. Buy a crochet-hook and find your lucky shirt 10-12 raggedy friends, and you have everything you need to make an heirloom rug. The best news is that these rugs are completely washable, because all the material is pre-shrunk!
Cut each shirt, starting at the bottom and going around and around up to the armpits. The resulting strip should be very long about about a half-inch to an inch wide. Thinner material needs to be wider, so that the rug you make is sturdy. Wind the strip into a neat ball of "yarn." If you despise the tedium of cutting and winding, then cut as you go. Cut a little, then crochet a little, then cut a little, and crochet a little...This is good for those who haven't chosen a theme for the rug and want to "play it by ear."
Start your rug with a bold color that will give it a solid center, and then radiate outward. If you like to have a plan, lay the re-purposed shirts side by side before you cut them up, and you'll get a sense of emerging patterns. If you use a striped print after two differing solid colors, and then you move on to two more solid colors, it will create more of an impression. Maybe you want the color itself to be the theme, like varying shade of pink for a little girl's room.
Handmade rugs are like quilts. The re-used fabrics tell a story. The rug for the little girl's room might be composed of one of her baby receiving blankets, a stained onsie, her favorite play-shirt, or a dress-up dress that got paint spilled on it. If you can't bear to have your memories stepped on, put it in a low-traffic area or that precious place where your kid's feet first touch the floor in the morning.
If you aren't sentimental about the materials in your rug, you will have more freedom to head to your local thrift shop for second-hand shirts to fill gaps in your pattern. Make sure you keep the type of material consistent. Of course, T-shirt material isn't the only green medium for making rugs. Bedsheets, old jeans, blankets, almost anything with a solid chunk of seemless fabric can be turned into a mud-catcher. Just remember, if you don't want a ruffley rug, do not combine stretchy and non-stretchy material. The whole rug should be made out of different shades of denim or out of bed-sheet material or out of T-shirts, not a combination of all three.
If you have any experience with crocheting, then making a rug will feel like starting the crown of a hat. If you choose to make an oval rug, it will feel like a very big bootie sole. If you are a beginner, you can find various crochet stitch patterns on the internet, but it's okay to keep it simple. The basic crochet stitch works quite well for rugs, and you can add a stitch when things start to buckle. Everyone has ripped out stitches and started over. Practice makes perfect!
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