Latch Hook T-Shirt Rug

I found this awesome tutorial through craftgawker.com. The Gawkerverse is a magical place where blog posts are stored for people to search and marvel at.  It is my obsession. I'm not ashamed. Okay, maybe just a little, haha. Anyhoo, it is a magical place where one can look at either crafts, weddings, food, or in/exterior design.  Like I said, magical. 

So one day, I found said awesome tutorial and was {insert snobby educated British accent here} totally inspired.  I have exactly a gazillion two million ninety-nine thousand five hundred twenty three t-shirts from various activities in school and else where that I did not wear anymore.  I saw this crafty activity as a way to use this poor, sad t-shirts and make something I can use now.

Behold my little marvelous work and wonder...

My Prayer Rug!!!

If you would like to embark on this tedious and time consuming but entirely worth it project...

    Items You Will Need

• A ginormous pile of t-shirts
• Sturdy, reliable fabric scissors
• Small piece of paper
• A nice and good latch hook
• Latch hook canvas/backing stuff (can you tell I'm no expert?)
• Elastic binding stuff (should be in same area in craft store)
• Needle and thread
• Optional: fabric dye
• Optional: gloves or some other way to combat blisters



Rough Directions:

1. Make yourself a little template of how small you want your little strips. I suggest 4in. x 1in., maybe even a little skinnier. Then gather all of your t-shirts and snip away!  Trust me, this takes hours... and a few more hours.  But you must prevail, for the reward is oh so sweet! :)  Feel free to wear some sort of gloves or other form of anti-blister-ant. I won't call you a wimp at all.  Just don't steal your sister's brand spankin' new softball batting gloves for this stage of rug-tastic development.  She will get super angry.  Oops...

2.  Next, you must make your decision considering your colors.  I, personally, used RitDye to dye all of my white strips grey.  (It doesn't make to me to have a white rug for walking on.) Then, wash and dry all of your strips to get rid of all those little fuzzies.  Trust me, you will find a lot in the lint catcher.

Words of Caution: you may need to wash the strips in a sort of lingerie bag so they don't clog your washer/dryer.  I didn't have this problem but some people did. 

Then you will have some nice piles...

I separated them by color to get an idea of how I wanted design my rug.

After much debate and inner turmoil, I decided to go with stripes.

3. Now to the latch-hooking!! If you don't know how, follow the instructions through the tutorial link from the top of this post.  But before you latch hook anything, you need to hand sew the binding around the edge.  This keeps the material/grid stuff from coming apart.  Sandwich the edges between folded elastic and sew!  I promise you will not regret this step.

So, it should kind of look like this around the edges...

Now how should you space your strips? However you want! It depends on how thick/thin your strips are.

This is how I spaced mine... every other horizontally and skip up three vertically... if that makes any sense...

I used the blue grid on the canvas stuff to size my stripes: 2 blocks wide and 1.5 blocks for the outside stripes.



Tadaa!!!  A lovely addition to my room.  My new prayer rug! :)