Well, well, look what we have here! We girls have been wanting a rug for our room for some time but never found the perfect thing until.....we saw a picture of a braided rug in an old decorating book.
Here are the strips (about 1 1/2"wide...the wider the cut strip, the fatter the braid) that we cut from all of our scrap fabric..notice all the bright colors!
The strips were sewn together (length-wise) and are now in the midst of being braided... I love this part! Since we're braiding our strips, we made three separate, VERY long runs...then we braided them together.
(someone had to get a picture of our cute pincushion.... find more like this on our Etsy shop! )
Once you have all the strips braided and have one long braid, you start wrapping your braid around itself and sewing it together in whatever size and shape that you want. We didn't want a huge rug and since this was our first attempt at braided rug making, we started our center about 6"in length. You need to keep your rug laying down when you're working on it, or it will have a tendency to curl up (we found this out the hard way... thanks to Nanny for helping us with that little problem) into a bowl shape. We also found that a curved needle and clear quilting thread (easily available at some place like JoAnn Fabrics) work great for this job. Once you've used up almost all of the braid that you have made, but your rug isn't big enough, stop with some fabric hanging free, and sew on more fabric scraps, braid, and then start your hand sewing again. Continue until the rug is just the size that you're wanting.
The finished product! This was a lot of fun for us girls and we're sure that you'll enjoy doing it as much as we did.
We'll try to post about our other rug that we made real soon.... so stay tuned!
Adorable - as always!! Great job!
Posted by: Katie | May 02, 2008 at 05:46 PM
You girls are just way too AMAZING! That is an adorable rug- I've never seen a braided rug in such bright colors... leave it to the Long girls to add new style to an ordinary thing :) How long do you think it took you to make this?
Love you girls!
Posted by: Kailey B. | May 03, 2008 at 06:53 AM
Dear Kailey~
In answer to your question, this rug probably took about 10 days or so to make.... we were working especially hard to finish it in a short time! We love and miss you girls so much and are looking forward to seeing you!
With love from the Long Girls,
Abigail
Posted by: Abigail | May 03, 2008 at 07:23 PM
Beautiful! So many colors--just like a rainbow!
Posted by: randi | May 06, 2008 at 07:05 AM
This rug looks fantastic!
Thank you for sharing the instructions. I would love to make such a rug for our bedroom.
Posted by: Marie | May 07, 2008 at 09:41 AM
I'm wondering when you say that you sewed the rug together, could you explain this a bit more?
I'm totally inexperienced with anything to do with sewing, but I really think this might be doable, even for me.
I LOVE your blog & all of your great pictures.
Posted by: Michelle in middle Tennessee | May 16, 2009 at 05:22 PM