How to Crochet an Area Rug with Yarn

Yesterday I finally finished crocheting the colorful area rug! 

Cat for scale.

A few months ago I received two trash bags full of old yarn. I was warned they were not color coordinated, and were all different sizes and weights and it looked like mostly acrylic, but still took them since I didn't have a lot of yarn then, and wanted to try some scrap blankets and colorful projects.   After testing the yarn using the burn test, I determined most of it was  acrylic, but some balls were wool.  I started a ripple stitch blanket and quickly realized that I would not be able to have the stripes be all one same color, so I did a smaller crocheted cushion cover instead. 

Catherine Wheel cushion, learned stitch from YouTube videos!

I crocheted a basket to hold my stationary, as well as some slippers for my husband. I made some dryer balls. I gave a few balls of yarn to my cat who likes to chase them around the house and fight with them.  The pile of yarn stayed the same, though, still huge, still taking up a lot of space in the closet. I needed a yarn-eater project. And so the area rug was born.

The only colors I avoided were the browns. Other than that I just grabbed colors as they came. Holding 9 strands of yarn together I started going around in an oval. I have some experience with crochet, so I just winged this without a pattern. I didn't want to be counting , but in general you want to increase in the rounded edges, then crochet normally on the straight edges. On some rounds I increased 5 times, others just 3, or none, depending on how it looked, trying to keep it from waving (too many increases) or curling (too few).  But instructions like these might help. Because the balls of yarn were not all equal, some of them ran out before the others, which helped stagger the color changes. In some cases, if I had the same color, I just tied the ends of the yarn with a square not and continued crocheting with the new ball. Other times I just found a color that looked like it was in the same "family", or that it might add something interesting to the rug. That's how it turned out to change colors depending on the dominant tints, going from a yellowish center to a hot pink round and then to orange and green.

At the end of the rug, when I was already down to the last balls of yarn and didn't have enough for substituting the colors when they ran out, I just did an extra round around the rug, and then sewed in the end: no fancy finishes or edgings.

While it doesn't show up in pictures, the rug does want to curl up around the edge: I'm guessing that because I continued knitting with a thinner strand as the yarns ran out, I should've gone up a needle size, or made the stitches a lot larger to compensate. For now I'll see if it settles on its own, but if not, I'll probably rework the last couple of rounds.  I also broke the hook halfway through the project. I bought a set of 6 glittery hooks in Joann's about 7 years ago, and little by little they've been snapping  right in the middle. It happened while knitting the round basket, and I had to toss the substitute the needle halfway through with a different size. This time, I decided to repair it: I held the broken edges over the flame of a candle to melt the plastic, then smooshed them together. I wrapped some tape around the bump caused by the fused plastic squeezing out the ends to make it smoother, and was able to finish the rug. The hook feels strong, so I may keep it and continue using it.

repaired hook with a view of the wrong side of the rug

I am not only happy that I finished the area rug, which is now covering the floor next to my side of the bed, but that I also went through ALL THAT YARN. There is still about a shopping bag full of odds and ends of yarn in browns, tans and variegated colors, but that will be easier to stash away in a corner until I come up with an idea for it.

Making time for Making

I thought that if I didn't have to work, I'd become a production powerhouse, plowing through DIY projects and learning new skills. But the reality of working from home, then becoming unemployed, has been very different.  At first I became depressed: winter blues and getting laid off, along with health problems do not go well together. Currently I have a freelance gig, so while a bit of income is trickling in, I still have a lot of hours to do "other" stuff.

Sadly, most of them go down the timesink of social media. I wake up and fool around on Pinterest, read my blogs, go through my twitter feed, catch up on Facebook and 2 hours have been spent. Sometimes I do all that when I'm supposed to be working, so my "work hours" of sitting in front of a computer multiply and when I notice, it is 5pm, I've been sitting in front of the computer all day and I still have to finish my freelance work. And the pile of dishes stares at me. And I still have dinner and lunch to plan for the next day, and cook. And whatever bit of picking up around the house I need to do.

This blog is in a way my excuse to make something productive out of all the time I spend on social media, mostly looking for inspiration and ideas of my next project, my next household DIY, the next craft I want to begin and recipes I bookmark for someday. I want to make all of those into tangible goods, and document them here. And not just the ones that turn out well.

I wish I had documented last week's efforts to improve my bookcase coat rack by sticking some fabric to the back of the bookcase using starch.  Let me just tell you that I should've tested with a small strip before cutting the fabric and then realizing it shrunk when it came in contact with the starch, and also that hey, starch lacked the sticking power. I kludged it by wedging the fabric between the backboard and the bookcase around the existing nails and by using some mounting tape. I will definitely be redoing it, since it taunts me every time I come into the house and hang my jacket. Bad enough that I don't even want to show the full thing, just the upper right/hand side corner.

I'm saving energy for re-doing it, since I'll need to buy new fabric... the one I used is unsalvageable, sadly.

And so, I-ll add it to my list of projects, which I'll also add to the sidebar, so that I can keep them in mind!

Currently on my work in progress list are:

• knit garter stitch baby blanket 
• knit lace alpaca shawlette
•  a crocheted oval area rug made with a great variety of odd balls of yarn I got from someone's garage, mostly acrylics.
• hand stitched strap from upholstery fabric for a purse I'd like to use as a cross body bag. 
• a sewn and quilted laptop sleeve
• fix bookcase mishap

On the next project list:

• Constellation embroidery hoops
• Blue queen size pieced and quilted duvet cover. 
• pajama pants for my nephew
• DIY loom (and loom knit scarves)
• More knit lace shawls
• sun print art

Thoughts on Starting a Business out of Making

Ever so often the idea to make a living out of making stuff pops up in my life. I even went as far as moving to Colombia to pursue a career in making things (and being my own boss) although it was going to be more technical instead of creative: I enrolled in a program to become a dental technician, making retainers, dentures and others to the surprise of everyone who knew me.  I liked making things, but when my work writing and teaching at a local university collided with the class schedule I crunched some numbers about what I'd be making financially once I graduated, I decided not to continue. I didn't love it enough to do it for so little.  

My technical handiwork

I didn't stop making things, though.  In the past, when thinking about making things (and charge money for them) I've decided not to do so. For example, I did the numbers on a hand knit hat a friend asked me to make.  It takes me a few days of knitting to make a hat, there's the cost of materials and the price of my labor. Then overhead. By the time I had a number, it was beyond what my friend could afford. So I just asked her to buy the yarn and I made it for her as a gift.

those i-cords and pompoms took forever

Five years ago, when looking at the craft market, the most I could aspire to was selling to my circle of acquaintances, selling to boutiques as a consignment or trying to get into the craft markets in Latin America. But it just wasn't a market that values hand-made goods as much as in other places, I think mostly because labor is cheap. In Colombia on 2007, I went to an artisan expo organized by the government of Medellin. What I found is that I had a much higher appreciation of what things are worth that was at odds with the reality of the market. For example, this dazzling 78 by 72 inch crochet bedspread made in embroidery thread.  Who knows how many months of time went into it, and how much thread, and the skill to put it all together by hand. The asking price? 400 USD.

87 Inches by 82, for 400 USD

 At the same artists' expo I met a lacemaker, Doña Amparo. She told me about how she had learned to make lace at the age of 5 from her mother. The money they earned from selling the lace made it possible for her to buy shoes or clothes.  So Amparo had a lifetime of experience in a fairly uncommon craft... and the price for the doily was 11 USD.

I was a broke student and even those low prices were out of my range, but those goods would have definitely been underpriced had they been in an international market. While 11 USD is pocket money here in the USA,  in Colombia, that doily will buy a week's worth of food.

All this for less than the cost of the doily.

I am now in a different place and time, and so I went over to Etsy since that's where I've recently bought handmade goods. They have a whole "seller school" series which I've taken a bit of a look into today. I sat through a couple of online Etsy Lab talks, one about pricing goods correctly to make sure your business thrives, and a second one on how to take good photographs of your products.  I'm not sure that I will follow the path of entrepreneurship of handcrafted goods, but if I ever do, I want to do it in a well informed fashion. And in the meantime, I'll polish up on my photography skills: all these pictures above were taken years ago, and my skills haven't improved much since then.

On Chevron Quilts

Today I was thinking about quilts. I have a shopping bag full of fabric remnants I got for free all in dark blues that I would love to piece together. I've made three quilts in my life, and only one of those from start to finish.  The first was for my brother, a quillow. a lap quilt that gets folded into a pocket and turns into a pillow, that my mother and I pieced using simple rectangles and then I quilted using straight lines on our home sewing machine. The second was a hand pieced quilt my sister in law made with her mother that had sat unfinished for a long time. I took it home with me and finished the hand stitch in the ditch quilting, repaired some seams that were coming apart and then bound the quilt. The third is a quilt I made for that same sister in law, this time when I was a guest at their home. I used mostly kanga fabrics that had been brought from Tanzania and Zimbabwe, centering the patterns the best I could so that the large designs would show up nicely and I added quite a bit of  purchased fabrics to fill out the pattern and make it a queen size bed spread which I then wrangled under the borrowed sewing machine and quilted using a walking foot. It was a great experiment which you can see below, folded in half.

Now I'm thinking about the new quilt. It will probably be a pieced duvet cover, since we do have our feather duvets we enjoy using in the winter, and this way we'll be able to use it on its own in the summer as a very light quilt, or in the winter with the feathery insides.

 I feel that now that it seems that the rage for chevrons is cooling off, I can give in to them knowing that it is not just fashion fever talking, but that I actually like the look.  Sometimes I have a hard time telling if I like some things because I see them everywhere and it seems everyone else likes them, or if I honestly like them. Like the ombre trend. But I digress. (although maybe next quilt will be a hand-dyed cotton ombre quilt.. hmmmm)

So there are apparently a few ways to make Chevrons.

One is using stripes, cutting them into squares and piecing them to make the zigzags like the next example from crazy mom quilts that I found on the bee square blog.

 the other is using larger quarter square triangles in strips and  offsetting them.
like the next example from Rebecca on the Threadbias blog.

 a third is using triangles into squares and piecing the points, like Sew Caroline explains on her blog, which she used for a smaller project, a bag. An ombre chevron bag. Be still my beating heart, not yet, not yet.

I haven't made up my mind which I'll use yet, perhaps I'll do more research, or attempt a "trial run".I can see the advantage of the strips into squares and then into chevrons, but because the fabrics I have tend to run in bigger prints, I think it would be better to have larger squares instead of such teeny tiny ones, so that the pattern shows better.

I would like to fool-proof the piecing, since I'm not that great at sewing at the intended seam allowances, a fact I learned while making my last quilt, where my calculations were completely wrong and the quilt turned out a lot smaller than I intended, and I had to improvise with a wider border. In the end it turned out well, but I'd like to improve with each quilt... I hope accurate measurements is not too much to ask.  One of my other goals is to try and limit myself to using the fabrics I already have, so I am OK with the pattern looking somewhat different, but if I run short of fabric, I'm still open to getting needed fabric from the creative reuse center where I volunteer, Scrap DC.

And as for quilting, I'll either do a simple stitch in the ditch on my home machine, or this lovely colorful running stitch. Because I won't be quilting through many layers, just the top and lining, I think it won't be too hard to get even stitches... and I do have lots of blue embroidery floss!

While searching for the quilt pattern, I stumbled on the beautiful Gees Bend quilts. I spent a bit of time reading about them and looking at the designs, at how they were just sewn going with the flow, with what the fabric dictated, and then ended up looking really lovely. From what the quilters explain, it is all quite effortless for them.  I hope I can someday develop that flair with color and value balance, until then, I'll just continue to enjoy looking at the quilts and thinking that no matter what my quilt ends up looking like, if it's done with love and care, it'll be perfect for us. 

From the Smithsonian's site:  "It was Annie Mae Young's 1976 work-clothes quilt that caught collector William Arnett's eye and led to the Gee's Bend exhibitions."

awkward first post is awkward

Thanks for reading this blog!  This is a scrapbook/notebook/diary of the things I make for myself, my home and the people I love.  The internet has been such a great source of inspiration, knowledge and training in many of the crafts I do, that I'd like to be able to thank the people who fill the web with ways in which to learn new skills. And I think a blog is a great place to list my inspiration sources, the tutorials I get things from and then show the finished products I make.  I'd like to learn how to take better pictures of the things I make, and perhaps once I feel comfortable with a camera, I'll be able to share some of my original ideas with others.


I'm currently living in the USA and my origins are in Latin America, so this blog might get bilingual, with sources and inspiration in Spanish or English.