No-Sew Rag Rug

This post was originally published on Saturday, April 14. But I'm an idiot, so it was published in the wrong place.

So today was a new crafty foray, for my own personal uses rather than any grand dreams of resale. My new apartment has hardwood floors, and I need area rugs. I have a buttload of fabric from numerous impulse purchases at various craft and fabric stores during various periods of inspiration for all the stuff I was going to sew! but never did. A rug rag seemed like a great idea.

I looked around the internet a bit (by which I mean I did a Google search and looked at maybe the top five results) and found tutorials for braided rags sewn into a rug, and an intriguing one for a rug made without sewing. That'll be easy, I thought.

Of course, I should have known that nothing is ever as easy as I think it's going to be.

I followed this tutorial from Little House in the Suburbs, and overall it's a great step-by-step. It is easier than it first seems, but I did have a few issues.

I started with some leftover fabric: a black velvet-like leftover from the Halloween cape project of 2004ish (I still have the cape, it's pretty badass)

This guy's big brother helps me be an even bigger dork.

and the sad leftovers from the failed 30th birthday dress attempt, a shiny hot pink "shantung."

This was supposed to be a really sweet skirt, except I suck at sewing.

Everything started out okay,

and I followed the directions for adding pieces of fabric, although that was where I started to run into a bit of confusion. The tutorial writer just says she did it "in a way to keep the pattern," which meant that I just blithely went along and didn't think much about it. It seemed successful at first.

The tutorial also instructs me to add two more strips of fabric each time I round the corner, but I found two things as I went along:

1) This was, like, a lot of work. More than I had thought, anyway, taking way longer than my initial half-formed fantasy of "zip zip I am done." I was at this thing all day, in between eating just about everything in my apartment. The pink fabric frayed like crazy, and the only lighter I could find was very difficult to use on it.

At one point I had 16 strips, I think.

2) As I went along and the outside got much wider, there was a distinct difference in tension, with the middle bits all super tight and squished, and the outside much looser. I like the way the outer part looks a lot, and kind of hate the inner part.

The end result, as of 9pm, was what I think will amount to a fancy new bed for my cats. I got bored of cutting new strips of the black velvet all the time, and generally bored of the whole thing. It didn't look as perfect as I wanted it to, but there was certainly no way I was going to do take it apart to do it again. It won't lay flat because of the difference in tension, and the bright pink, besides being hard to photograph, doesn't look as nice as I'd like with the brown of the floors. It's too small to be much use (except to the cats; they love small slightly cushioned spots and were fighting over this windowsill spot at one point, though this is just McClane being kinda chunky).

He sleeps like this often. When he isn't whining or yowling for no damn reason.

Also, I need to get something to attach to the bottom so it doesn't act like a banana peel the first time I step on it. That would be totally hilarious, but only if somebody were here to see it and I only landed on the bed.

One step away from slapstick stardom.

Overall, today's craftiness enabled me to watch three movies (including Snakes on a Plane, which I got for $3 at a thrift store yesterday) and loads of episodes of TOS. Kirk and Spock were in fine form in today's episodes, and I grow continually more obsessed with young Leonard Nimoy. He was SO. HOT.

Anyway, keep calm and craft on.