I don’t expect that all the things I made for the old house will find the perfect spot here, but some have in ways that have been a pleasant surprise. The t-shirt and denim rag floor rugs proved to be exactly what I needed in the kitchen and bathroom to make the hard tile floor bearable for my still-sensitive feet. (I got plantar fasciitis at the beginning of the year.)

We’ve not needed floor rugs before. I made them because I like the look of them. Now we do – and we need big ones. There are three uncarpeted areas that need protection here: under the dining table, in the family room, and on a small area between the kitchen and the hall.

After pricing commercial rugs in the sizes we need I got a little dizzy and started googling DIY floor rug ideas instead. I’d weave them, but my loom can only make 80cm wide strips. I don’t like the look of strips stitched together, or the thought of the loom being occupied with floor rugs for a long time, so I’ve been looking at non-loom rag rug DIYS or methods that only require a simple, small loom.

There are various tutorials out there for making rugs from braided rag strips. One kind has you hand or machine stitch the braid into a coil, but with rugs the sizes I’m thinking of it will be too hard to hold and manipulate it under the machine. There’s a ‘no-sew rag rug‘ method that’s appeals more.

I reckon I could also make a rug by crocheting around the rag strips with heavy cotton thread, like I did for the coaster below using linen thread around heavy twine:

All of those methods involve lots of twisty, fiddly RSI-inducing work for the hands, however. There’s a basketry method similar to the crochet one where you simply hand sew each round to the last, but it might be too slow for a large rug.

Recently an email from Interweave reminded me of pin looms. Perhaps I could make a larger pin loom to weave squares on then join them together to form a rug. It would make the majority of the work do-able while watching tv at night. Rather like crocheting granny squares.

And there’s another idea: granny squares crocheted from rag strips using a huge hook. It still might aggravate the RSI in my hands, however.

One rag rug method that I’m not considering seriously because it’s very slow is the rya or ‘shag’ rug one, where you knot short strips onto a mesh. Still, it is very appealing, especially done with soft t-shirt material.

Other DIY floor rug ideas I’ve found include buying a cloth drop sheet and painting it, or embellishing a coir rug. The former wouldn’t provide a softer surface to walk on, and the cat would consider the latter a giant nail sharpening mat.

I think a little experimenting with pin looms is in order. But if you know of another cheap DIY floor rug method, let me know.