This is the second braided rug I’ve worked on and completed this summer. The first one is in greys and black, and you can see it here. Working with colour made it more challenging to come up with a colour scheme and make it look good. I had many more colours of t-shirt yarn available to me but I decided to stick with blues, oranges and reds.

For the grey rug I managed to only use materials made from Boris’ collection of startup/tech conference shirts, but for this one I used a few shirts sources from Value Village because I wanted specific colours. If you’re going to buy second-hand shirts to make yarn, I highly recommend mens extra large shirts to maximize material.

I made this over a three week period, which included making four or five additional balls of yarn. It was a great project to work on in the evenings while binging on Netflix.

The tutorials I used to learn how to make t-shirt yarn and the braided rug can be found in this previous blog post.

Last night I decided to take apart and redo the centre of the braided rug. I disliked the colours I started with and the farther along I got with the rug, the more it bothered me. I was hesitant to do this because I wasn’t sure if the process of undoing the braids would somehow mess up the rest of the piece. Thankfully it worked out fine.

The centre of the rug was a mix of red, navy blue, and orange yarn, and it was the orange I decided to replace with a bright blue. I think it ties in better with what is currently the blue outer edge but will eventually be just another stripe of colours in the rug.

Before

After

The new colours make the centre stand out better, and toned down the overwhelming orange. There will be more red and blue in the rest of the rug, and a few other colours I haven’t decided upon yet.

I have a lot of work left to do because the braided rug is currently only twenty-two inches wide, and I want it to be about five feet.

Boris and I were over on Bowen Island for the long weekend, and I brought along the materials to begin work on my second braided rug project. I want this one to be colourful, and a long oval shape.

My biggest struggle with this one will be figuring out how to make the colours flow. I started working with the orange yarns because I have three balls in various shades and I will use these and the red one to carry throughout the entire piece. I wasn’t expected to make an orange rug, but now that I’m this far along with it, an orange rug is what it’s going to be.

To give you an idea about the scale of this (because it looks small in the photo) the centre section above is about ten inches long. The colours are way off in this first photo, but the third photo is closer to what it actually looks like.

I’m pleased with how much progress I made on this over the weekend because I also spent a lot of time outside walking, swimming, and reading a book. I would love to finish this rug by the end of August and have it brightening up our bedroom floor in the fall.

I finished my first braided rug last night and it looks wonderful. I did most of the work on it last week and this past weekend after procrastinating on it for most of the month. I watched a lot of Netflix while I did it.

I still have about seventeen balls of t-shirt yarn to use up and will be working on a second larger and more colorful rug for our bedroom because colors set the mood for me. If you’re interested in making your own braided rug (or t-shirt yarn), find the tutorials I used in this blog post.

Thank you to Boris for purging so many of his old t-shirts to make this project possible.

A couple months ago at Sewing Bee my friends Val and Dori decided to experiment with making yarn from old t-shirts, and then knitting it into rugs. I was intrigued by this upcycling project, but had no interest in doing any knitting. I looked around for other ideas for using t-shirt yarn and found good tutorials around making a braided rug.

When Boris did a clothing purge just weeks after their experiment I put aside a giant stash of t-shirts and have slowly worked away at transforming them into yarn. I ended up with twenty-seven balls of yarn because Boris had a lot of shirts packed away in his drawers.

These are excellent step-by-step instructions on how to make continuous yarn from t-shirts.

This weekend I began swatching colours and practicing my braiding with some of the yarn. There are three different methods that I’ve found of attaching the braids together, from sewing, gluing, and tucking. I decided to go with the tucking method and watched the two videos over on this blog post to learn the method. The videos also include how to splice more yarn onto the ends of the pieces you are working with.

I’ve swatched a circle, an oval, and attempted something like a rectangle to figure out how to shape things. I’m going with the oval for the final shape and started working on added more length to it this afternoon. I have so much yarn I can make multiple rugs or a really massive one. I’m just going to see where it goes because it’s an experiment.