Tutorial: Braided/Woven Rag Rug

I'm not sure why I was playing Monopoly without any money or properties, so it's a good thing I'm not blogging about that.

Obviously I've put this picture up because this is a tutorial on how to make the rug my brother-in-law is hovering over. Obviously.

I asked my grandma how she made these rugs. I assumed they were braided, but she explained and then showed me that they were actually woven. They take a while to make, but I love the results! Braided rugs in my experience tend to come apart when the seams burst. Enter woven rug, no seams!

I've made a couple in my day. The Sunflower one:

I started with two dark gold strips and one yellow, and then I switched to three yellows, three blues, three reds, then finally three greens. It's a little more confusing to work with all one color, which is why this wasn't my first one.

This lovely semi-round one is my first one. It's actually made from a couple U of U T-shirts. I remember that as I wipe my feet. :)

I used black and red throughout, then switched between tan, black, brown, tan, and then black again for the third strip of material.

It works best to use stretchy material for at least one of your strips. I've used old T-shirts in the rugs above (5 extra-large shirts for each one). Another one I made and gave to my sister used random scraps, both stretchy and not, and it worked just fine. I just made sure that at least one of the strips at all times was stretchy. The rug is a bit more forgiving this way.

Shall we begin?

Cut strips of fabric about 2" wide. I cut the shirts in strips vertically.

I also found that if I leave the shoulder seams intact (see below), a couple strips can be extra-long without more work on my part.

So you should have a pile of fabric strips.

Start by taking three strips and lining them up like so:

It helps if they're not all exactly the same length, so they don't all run out at the same time. (We'll get there later.)

Fold them in half, and then sew across the end:

Then you're going to start braiding the strips. The seam kind of gets turned inside-out like in the following picture. That's a good thing, because then it doesn't show as much.

I braided about 9 or 10 inches. This will give you an oval-shaped rug. If you want a circle, then a shorter braid would do that for you. Likewise, if you want a longer-shaped rug, make a longer braid.

The braid should be loose enough that you can easily put your finger through it, but not so loose that it gets misshapen when you do. My braid started out loose and then got tighter as I went. I did go back and fix that, making it all even.

So you start with your braid looking like this. The black piece on the right is coming out from under the middle piece, and the black piece will become the warp. On a loom, the warp is the string strung on the loom, while the weft is what goes back and forth, fyi.

See, the black piece goes down along the length of the braid:

Now, this is the only complicated part: transferring from braiding to weaving. If you remember the pattern of over-under-under, it might help. The far left piece (in my case a lovely ballet-pink) crosses over the middle piece (this is the over part):

Then it goes under the black and the green (under, under):

Pull the pink piece taut:

And put the pink piece out to the side. (This picture is possessed and won't load except sideways. Sorry.)

Now you take the green one over-under-under (over the pink one, under the black, and under one part of the braid-- green this time):

The black piece should still (and always) be pointing itself downwards in the direction you're going. The two other pieces should be out to the side. Now you take the pink one over-under-under.

Like so:

Pull it out and to the side:

Now take the green one over-under-under:

And out to the side:

Let's fast-forward to where I'm almost to the end of the braid. Now just like when you're crocheting, if you want to make a curve, you sometimes have to go through the same hole twice. So you can see where the green piece is coming out.

You send the pink one over-under-and then under the same piece as last time.

(I'm pretty sure you can't see what's going on in the above picture.... I sure can't.)

But in this next one, you can see that I'm pulling the green piece through a green loop of braid:

And in this one, I'm pulling the pink one through the same green loop of braid:

Double up on stitches until you round the corner. On this corner, there were about 4 stitches where I doubled up. I prefer to put two stitches in each hole for a while, rather than putting 4 or 5 stitches through one hole. I'm not sure that would work so well.

Anyway... continue down the other side of the braid. The black piece is still pointing downwards while the pink and green pieces do all the in-and-out weaving.

When one piece runs out, I just sew another piece on and keep going. In this case, I used my machine, but I've sewn it by hand when working in the car. If you want to change colors, you would just sew on a new colored strip and keep going.

When you're done with the rug, just tuck in the ends and hand-stitch them in place. This is the ugly side:

And this is the prettier front:

In the finished rug, it's hard to see where you started. I found the start of my braid in this rug, and I'm pointing to it. The braid continues downward. See, told you you can't see it.

This is a close-up of where I changed colors. I'm not sure why I decided to put this on here.

As a finishing touch, I took a strip of green material and wove it through the rug, kind of tying it all together. Otherwise the green border looked pretty random.

A few words of warning: as you go, make sure you're making a flat rug. This is done by making double stitches only when you need to (like when it would be a stretch to weave through the next hole). If you add too few, you end up with a bowl, rather than a rug. If you add too many, you get some weird warping that keeps your rug from laying right.

Example A:

You can still use it, but should you put it in front of a door, your family and guests might kind of hate the stupid thing. It works just fine for a mid-floor rug, though. Sort of.