oversized crochet rug. from t-shirt yarn.

Have you seen this guy?

He quit his day job for crafting, like a boss. He drinks beers while he arm knits, like a boss [watch the video. 26 seconds in. It’s even leffe]. But I don’t knit, and also I have no need for large squishy semi-furniture. So I was content with craft crush that I couldn’t really act on.

Until I convinced myself that I needed a rug. (More accurately, I hate our current rug, which is only a little like needing one.) So I made this.

Commence buying plain white jersey sheets at Walmart.

Commence cutting into one-inch strips, tying end on end, and making into balls of yarn. This is an enormous pain. I hope you have a netflix subscription.

Commence buying a pink sparkly crochet hook. (It was the biggest one I could find.)

Then crochet in the round. Using three strands at once, I chained four to start, then single crocheted eight in the next round, then 12. You’ve got the idea. There are very good crocheting in the round tutorials and any of them will guide you. It works up very, very quickly and you can probably do the entire thing in several hours.

Except that you have to make the yarn.

A quick tip: I did try with just two strands of yarn but it wasn’t quite thick enough (see comparison below). Also, this 6-foot across rug ate up four king sized sheet sets worth of jersey fabric. Probably I just should have bought a rug at Ikea.

how the rug looked when i started using just my hands.

Also, I did try doing it with my hands instead of a hook, but it was really, really tough on hand muscles I didn’t know existed. And it was a little loose for my liking with three strands. Andrea uses five or so, and that would have made a hand-crocheted one tighter, but I lacked patience for making even more yarn.