Something old, new, borrowed and blue

That has nothing to do with a wedding.

I'm trying out a new craft. A month or so ago, I got an impulse to make a braided rug. I really can't remember what made me think of such; I've never even known someone who made one. I looked up a bunch of tutorials on the internet. When Steven gathered up some old clothes he was ready to throw out, I cut them up into long strips. I put it all in a bag and brought it with me to the new place, and finally today I got it out and start working on my braid.

I tied a loop to that closet doorknob to hold the braid steady until it got long enough to weigh itself down, and sat in the corner and braided, attached new strips of fabric as needed using a method I saw once on a blog that I can no longer locate. The fabric is all from old jeans and tshirts. The idea is that the center of the rug will be white, spiraling out to light blue, then dark blue. I'm finding that the jersey knit from the tshirts handles much more neatly than the denim, not that that's a big surprise. After a while, I sewed up the beginning end, cut off the extra fabric, and wound up what I had done so far to see how big a rug I had. Here's what that looked like:

I kind of wish I had started coiling it sooner - I would have done more of the light blue, because it's not as big yet as I want it to be. It will work out fine to have a larger dark band, though. I'll probably also try it out as an oval shape before sewing it up, to make sure I wouldn't  rather have it that way. I plan to put the rug in front of my bathroom sink. I just love making things, and it's especially neat to take stuff that was headed for the landfill and create something attractive and practical out of it.