Braided Rug Made from Old Tee Shirts

I had a bunch of worn out tee shirts and I needed a small rug.

I started making the rug in the Autumn of 2019.

The tee shirts were cut horizontally into 2 inch wide strips.

As the rug was braided, coiled and sewn, before a strand of the braid ran out, I attached a new strip to the end. The strip is divided across in quarters, folded on the first and third quarter, and then folded in half so that the fraying edges are encased. Before the half fold was made, glue stick was applied to keep the strip folded.

Carpet thread was used to hand stitch new braid to the outer edge of the rug.

New strips are added to the end of the braid as needed and not before. This limits the length of the free ends to make the braiding easier.

To start wrapping the braid into a circle I think I tucked a loose strip end into the braids of the next several laps around the circle. I continued wrapping the braid around the circle and sewing it in place as I went.

Eventually I found that my rug wasn't laying flat because I was holding the rug in my hands as I sewed it -- resulting in the stitching being cupped in one direction or another. This is a potential tripping hazard. For this reason, and because the rug would eventually become too heavy to hold, I layed the rug and the new coil flat on a table and used glue stick to tack them together before stitching. This ensured that not only was the new portion of the rug flat but that it would flatten the inner loops as well.

Once the rug was big enough I tucked the end or each strip into the previous round of braid and sewed it in place there.

Working an hour or two a day, the rug took four months to complete.

As I was making it I would periodically weigh the rug (using an electronic kitchen scale) and meaure its diameter so that I could roject how much more material I wold need to complete it. These were tracked in a Google Docs spreadsheet.