Rag Rug

Surprisingly, the gift that wound up taking the most time to make was the rag rug I made for Rachel.  I began it back in the summer time, after Rachel gave me all of her old scrubs with instructions to make a rug for her kitchen out of them (which made my present to her a real surprise this year I'm sure).

It started well.  Over the course of many episodes of Gossip Girl, I snipped and shredded the scrubs, then sewed all of the scraps together into a giant chain:

When I finished, I divided the rag strips according to color:

... and then I started braiding them.

Natasha finds all craft projects suspicious

Then I ran the whole thing through my sewing machine, laid it out on my floor, and voila!

It was lumpy and drastically asymmetrical.  Dang it.

So I unpicked the whole thing, bought the biggest hook I could find, and tried crocheting the long braided rope:

Nope.  Too small, too thick.

It took a lot less time to unravel the rug shape that time; although now I needed to unbraid the whole mess as well.  Since some of the sewing from version1.0 criss-crossed the braids, this meant a lot of picking and ripping with my pointy scissors.

Finally, three days before Christmas I had the whole thing back to the point it was a month ago.  Once more with the giant crochet hook, and this time it worked.  A bit of blocking, a bit of steam, and I had a rug that fits nicely in Rachel's kitchen:

Hmm.  Although those raggedy edges bug me the more I look at them.  I might do a bit more work on it the next time I  babysit.