Hula hoop rug weaving

At some point, I stumbled upon a Pintrest tutorial on how to weave a rug using old fabric and a hula hoop. Since I've only ever used my - rather large - hula hoop 2 or 3 times (not enough space indoors, I was constantly damaging things), I thought this may be a good way to put it to use.

I used a tutorial that seems to be down at the time of writing this (original link). However, Pintrest has lots of similar tutorials (here's a place to start).

It was very easy to do and went a lot more quickly than crocheting something this size (at least for me). I used 2 old double/king duvet sets with some spare fabric left over. After finishing the weaving, I crocheted 1 row around the edge to make it heavier and stop it from curling up. As an alternative, you may want to weave quite loosely (also when tying off!) to prevent this from happening.

And yes, that's the pouf I made a while ago there on the right. I do like upcycling and currently there's another idea brewing involving (non-hula-hoop) weaving and old jeans. Stay tuned...

Alpine rugs

Long time no write! This is partially due to Real Life commitments, but the size of my latest project probably accounts for something as well. May I present, the Alpine rug (on top of the shiny newly sanded and stained floor):

This project started as the works on the floor began. Taking out the carpet to reveal the old floorboards and give them new life seemed like a great idea... but what about cold feet? How about 2 bedside rugs? Maybe I can make them myself? It's a lot cheaper and I will have full control over colours and patterns...

Hook, line and sinker.

It was a lot of fun coming up with the concept and colours. The rugs are based on, and are meant to evoke, holiday memories from the Alps. So a chevron pattern for the mountain peaks was pretty much a given from the start. It wasn't easy to settle on colours, but in the end I picked 15 'alpine' shades of Stylecraft Special DK based on pictures of mountain landscapes.

White (1001) - Cloud Blue (1019) - Denim (1302)

Turquoise (1068) - Aster (1003) - Royal (1117)

Meadow (1065) - Khaki (1027) - Bottle (1009)

Parchment (1218) - Mocha (1064) - Walnut (1054)

Silver (1203) - Grey (1099) - Graphite (1063)

I used 2 strands held together and a 5 mm crochet hook. There are a lot of different variations of the chevron/ripple pattern out there, depending on how sharp/rounded and small/high you'd like the ripples to be. I used a variation of this one using 7 instead of 3 double crochet stitches between the peak (3 dc in one) and valley (3 dc together) stitches. I did 2 rows in each colour, 80 rows / 40 coloured stripes in total. The order of the colours probably took way too much time to decide upon :-)

After weaving in the ends, it was time for blocking! Because this took several weeks to complete (Real Life and all), it needed a bit of help to look more like a rectangle. I would usually spray it wet, but this thing was so thick I actually had to use the shower! 

Finally, I sewed part of an old fleece blanket to the underside of the rug for extra warmth/protection from dirt and attached a rug liner. These sewing jobs can be undone fairly quickly to wash either the fleece or the rug if necessary.

It took ages to complete both rugs, but they are totally worth it. Seeing the Alps as soon as your feet touch the floor, there are worse ways to wake up in the morning!