I continue to use the t-shirts that my cousin kindly bestowed upon me. There are still a lot left. My advice to rag-rug weavers: befriend a generous camp counselor.
For this batch of rugs, I warped the loom at 12 EPI (2 ends per dent in a 6 dent reed) using turquoise 8/4 cotton rug warp. The width is 24" in the reed; slightly narrower once off the loom and finished. I wove the entire project in plainweave. I prepared the weft by cutting 1 inch loops using a rotary cutter, and I attached the loops end-to-end in lark's head fashion, repeating the same sequences of colors. Here are the results.
In the three rugs above, I used two strands of worsted weight cotton
yarn for the weft at the hems. I wove three inches, folded over
twice, and hand stitched the hems. In the pictures above, you can still see pins holding the folded layers together because I hadn't sewn
the hems yet. In the picture below, you can see what one of the rugs looks like on the loom, with the full length of un-folded hem.
In the fourth rug (below), I did the hems differently. I held two strands of rug warp together to use as weft, wove half an inch, and hemstitched at either end. Then I added 3" fringe, using a fringe-twister on 6-thread sections. It's much more time consuming to make and more of a pain to take care of, but I love the way a fringed rug looks.
This was only a small dent in the t-shirt inventory, so there will be many more t-shirt rugs in my future. They're not the easiest thing to deal with, because there's so much stretch in the material. It's often hard to get clean lines and keep the tension even. But it sure is fun to try out different combinations!
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