My twitter friends have heard me talk about my hula hoop adventures.  I was inspired by this to give the rug a try.  I have a lot of t shirt scraps from my quilts.  I’ve knitted them into rugs and I’ve send some off to the amazing Ekra but when I saw this craft I thought it would be fun for the kids to try.

This was right after my son was shot in the eye with an air soft gun and he was taking it easy on the couch.  I thought the rug looked like a symbolic eye.

We sorted our t shirts by color and I cut one inch strips, which are actually loops.  Using white loops as the warp strands, we looped the tees around the hula hoop.

Following the instructions, my son wove the tees.  Each one is connected to the one prior by pulling the loop through.  It’s a great way to connect the tees and enables you to weave without having to have a long strand.

When we got close to the edge of the hula hoop, we cut the white loops and tied them in knots.  Instead of having a fringe, I wove the ends in to the bottom.

My son enjoyed the process and was proud of his rug.  The rug was quite small, however, and was lumpy.  The instructions state to not pull the shirts too tightly.  It did not appear that my son had done so, but there was no way to remove the lumps.

In the meantime, my daughter decided to replace the shag accent rug in her room because it was shedding.  She bought a bunch of pink shirts that were closed out at the craft store.  Many had marks or small holes but that did not matter for her purposes.

My husband built her a pvc frame and she used the same concept as the hula hoop to create her loom.  (It’s just like the old potholder looms we had as kids.)  She stretched loops around the top and bottom and wove across those loops.  She had done a lovely job and was approaching the end when we realized the rug was pulling in quite a bit.  Her father wanted to help her succeed in creating a perfect rug, so modified the width.  He then suggested that she weave the weft threads around the sides of the loom.

This ensured that the rug was uniform.  When she was done, we removed the side pipes and tied off the weft strands.  We have some ideas on how to eliminate tying off the sides, but haven’t experimented with them yet.

The end result is an adorable rug for miss pink!  You can read her version of the story on her new blog, Pink In Mind.