DIY RAG RUG

Flat 3/6 is a pretty small flat. There's not a lot of storage space, so in order to keep a pretty basic level of order in the flat I do genuinely try to limit my hoarding, difficult as it may be. For example, we have far too many bedsheets. Even after haven given a couple to charity, we still have about six or seven left, which is way too many when we only have one bed. To add to it, we also recently received a king sized duvet, which means these six or seven duvet covers won't even fit our duvet. I've been looking for ways to recycle all these sheets though, as I feel it's a bit of a waste just binning them or giving them away to charity. I mean it's a lot of fabric, just aching to be used for something.

So when I saw the idea of crocheting a rug and using old bedsheets for yarn on Meet me at Mikes's, i got pretty excited. I ran out and bought a giant crochet hook straight away (I had been waiting for an excuse to get one anyway), and went home and started ripping up one of my bedsheets.

This is an extremely simple project, so the list of supplies is pretty short. You'll need fabric. In my case, I used old bedsheets, but you could easily use any fabric, maybe a set of old curtains or a table cloth or something. Or of course just regular old fabric. Other than that, you'll probably need a pair of scissors to cut the strip, and then of course a crochet needle to crochet it all together again. I used a 9 mm crochet needle.

First you'll need to make your fabric rag yarn. There's loads of tutorials online on how to do this, but the gist of it is that you cut a ginormous continuous strip of fabric, which you then roll into a ball of fabric yarn. A lot of tutorials recommend doing all your cutting first, but I prefer cutting and rolling as I go along to limit knots and tangling. I also prefer tearing the fabric rather than cutting. A little less control, but it's a lot faster and the strips turn out pretty straight. Plus, I quite enjoyed tearing up my bedsheets. It made me feel a little bit like a the heroine of a story who's tearing up her bedsheets, tying them together and escaping through the window. Yes, I probably need to get out more.

Once you've got your ball of fabric yarn, the remaining is just crocheting. Of course, you can chose to follow a number of crochet patterns for this. I decided I wanted my rug a bit different, so instead of just doing a big circular rug, I decided to make several circles and join them all together. Each circle started out with 10 hoops, and then I just added on circles using a treble crochet stitch until the circle was as big as I wanted it. Once I had enough circles in different sizes, I joined them all together. One bedsheet resulted in four bigger circles and three smaller circles, i.e. a nice, irregularly shaped rug for the hall.

Any other suggestions of what i can use my extra bedding for?