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Aside from being attractive and useful, braided rugs are a great way to use up fabric scraps and are easy to make on top of it. If you can braid, you can make a rug.

Of course, not everyone has the benefit of a childhood spent with long hair, so here's a quick braiding tutorial. Start with three strips of cloth and tie or sew them together firmly. Attach the tied end to something-clamp it to a table, pin it to the knee of your jeans, get a child to hold it, whatever. You'll have three strips, A, B and C, with A on the left and C on the right. Pick up A and place it between B and C. Your three strips will now be arranged B, A, C. Pick up C and place it between B and A so that the order is BCA. Pick up B and place it between C and A, for CBA. Continue picking up the outermost strip, alternating between right and left, and placing it between the other two until you've used up your strips. A picture of the process using three different colors of string can be seen

here.

For the making of a rug, first decide what fabric to use. If you have scraps from quilting or household sewing, you can cut or tear them into strips; if you're buying yardage to make your quilt, make some continuous bias tape. In either case the strips should be 3-4 inches wide (7-10 cm) so that the raw edges can be easily folded to the inside. Remember that a rug has to deal with a lot of abuse, so durability and washability of the fabrics you choose is important.

For a rug, all you'll need is a long enough braid. It can be tough to handle strips of cloth more than a few feet long, though, so when a strip runs out you'll need to attach more. You can do this by sewing the new length on, or you can just braid a few inches of the new strip overlapping a bit of the old, treating them both as one strand. It's probably best to start your rug with three strips of different lengths, so they don't all need to be refreshed at the same point. Staggering lengths is also a great way to change colors; by changing one strand at a time to the new color you can get a gradual blending rather than an abrupt shift. To make a neat edge you'll also want the last three strands of the braid to be unequal, by a few inches or so.

Once you have a long strip of braid, it's time to sew it together. For the sewing use tough thread, like buttonhole twist-some commercial braided rugs use a monofilament that's essentially fishing line! If all you have is all-purpose, use three or four strands together.

To get started sewing, first decide if you want your rug to be a circle or an oval (it's technically possible to make a square or rectangle, but probably not worth the trouble). For a circle, just start coiling the braid around itself; for an oval, lay out a foot (30 cm) or so of braid and then coil around that. In either case, keep the braid as flat as possible and hide the raw ends of the starting strips as well as you can. Once you have the coil roughly laid out, start at the first bend at the center and start sewing the lengths of braid to each other along the sides. Your stitching will be a continuous spiral all the way to the outside of the rug, where you can make a smooth ending by dropping one striand of the braid at a time. It'll be tough to keep the braid flat at sharp turns as in the first few rounds of an oval rug, but with practice you'll get the hang of it.

And that is all there is to it.

Learn more about this author, Carrie Schutrick.
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