Crochet Fabric Rugs – Fabric Scrap-busting Project
Crochet was the first fiber art that I fell in love with. Growing up in a family of quilters it wasn’t easy to impress them, they had been doing for decades but no one in the family crocheted. Since I started this website I have been trying to figure out how to combine my two loves, crochet and quilting. Then I remembered I used to take my mom’s scrap fabric strips and use them like yarn. I made all kinds of things but my favorite was the crochet fabric rugs. If you have the basics of crochet, chain stitch and single crochet stitch, you can make one of these rugs in no time.
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Crochet Fabric Rugs
These rugs are a great way to use up leftover binding strips. Binding is typically cut on the bias and it won’t fray as much as fabric cut on the straight of grain. It truly is your choice of what fabric strips you use, I don’t mind the fraying and I have a lot more straight of grain strips laying around than I do bias-cut strips so I used straight of grain strips.
Another thing to think about before diving into making one of these rugs is how you are going to join your fabric strips. Over the years I’ve seen all kinds of methods for joining the fabric strips, tieing the ends together, cutting slits in the ends of each strip and then using a slip knot to join them, laying the ends on top of each other and allowing the crochet to join them, and sewing the ends together. I prefer sewing the ends together because I want to make a lot of fabric yarn at once and wind it into a ball. Tieing knots in the fabric will leave bumps in the rug and while laying the ends on top of each other would leave no bumps it means I need a tub of strips while I’m crocheting and I prefer to have a ball.
I’m making this rug for the area where I film my videos. It’s a wooden box on a concrete floor. It kills my back sometimes so I wanted something a little squishy (very technical term) to stand on. Plus I have lots of fabric strips that need a home!!
Supplies For Crochet Fabric Rugs
Pattern for Fabric Rug – I’m doing this one with a few minor adjustments listed below
Size Q Crochet Hook
2 1/2″ fabric strips
Large plastic tub for your fabric yarn, like a cleaned-up cheese ball tub
Making Fabric Yarn
I cut about 150 full width of fabric strips giving me almost 200 yards of yarn. Since I don’t need a huge rug I was sure this would be enough. I WAS WRONG. I spent an entire day cutting strips and sewing them together to end up with what you see in the photos. I will update this post when I get enough made with the final total.
I used my Accuquilt 2 1/2″ strip die to cut the fabric strips and then I sewed them along the narrow end to make a continuous piece of fabric. Once all of the strips were sewn together I pressed it in half, wrong sides together.
I used the cheese ball tub to put my fabric in because when I tried started to unwind it from the ball it was twisting and causing me a lot of headaches.
Crocheting A Fabric Rug
If you don’t know how to crochet but want to do this project, start with something else first, but this tutorial is a great beginner crochet tutorial.
You’ll want to make sure your tension is pretty loose. I crocheted too tight and ended up having to rip out several rounds because I was making a bowl, not a rug. I thought about keeping it as a bowl because it looked pretty cool but I need the rug, not the bowl.
While it took no time to work up what I have done, I did it while watching the pre-race festivities of the Daytona 500 well until I ripped most of it out, my arms ached. I think partly because I don’t crochet much anymore, I get a knitting machine for my birthday, and it’s really bulky yarn that we are using.
