Rug making has lost a lot of the popularity it had when I was growing up. That is actually to my advantage, because rug making yarn is now pretty easy to find in resale shops for around $.25. Over the years I have collected several bundles of wool rug yarn in a variety of colors. Most of what I have is in blues and greens, though, since I started buying it when I was making Blaze's play mat.
A few weeks ago, as I was sorting through my stockpiles of craft supplies, I rediscovered a kit for making a latch hooked 4th of July rug out of Polar Fleece ($3 on clearance, so long ago I don't remember buying it). I didn't figure I was ever going to really make that, so I was getting ready to throw it away, when I decided to open it up and see what was inside. The contents turned out to be more useful than I expected, a latch hooking tool and a rug-size piece of blank rug making canvas. Although I don't need a rug that looks like a flag, Blaze could use a throw rug for his bedroom.
The first step was creating a design for the rug. This is accomplished by creating designs on paper first, laying the paper under the rug canvas, and tracing the designs with a permanent marker.
I didn't have all the colors of rug yarn that I wanted, so I have been using pieces of the rug yarn I do have, to cut the right sized pieces from skeins. Each piece of yarn must be 2 1/2-inches long.
How to latch hook:
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On a rug this size, more than one person can work on it at the same time, which makes the project and the time go faster.
To finish off the edges on the completed rug, machine stitch rug binding tape along the raw edges of the rug, covering all the latch hook canvas that is showing. Sew the tape along the two long sides of a rectangular rug first. Cut off the tape at the end of each side.
Next, sew the tape to the two short sides, folding over a little extra tape to cover the ends of the latch hook canvas. In this way, no unfinished edges will show when the tape is sewn down.
Fold the tape over, so that it is flat against the back of the rug and use heavy quilting thread to sew it down by hand, using a whip stitch along the bottom edge of the tape.
The finished rug:
Added to Blaze's room:
That really turned out awesome... I was thinking some of the thinner areas might have been difficult. Were they? I like latch hook because you can really see it progress.
ReplyDeleteThe center design was the hardest, because there was more detail, but it was all drawn in black ink. Once it was started, it was hard to tell what was supposed to be what. Rug kits with preprinted designs are often printed in color to avoid that problem. If I were going to do this again, I would probably get various colors of permanent markers and color in the areas that were to be different colored yarn. The thin lines of the large gray gears were pretty easy.
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