Surprisingly, the gift that wound up taking the most time to make was the rag rug I made for Rachel. I began it back in the summer time, after Rachel gave me all of her old scrubs with instructions to make a rug for her kitchen out of them (which made my present to her a real surprise this year I’m sure).
It started well. Over the course of many episodes of Gossip Girl, I snipped and shredded the scrubs, then sewed all of the scraps together into a giant chain:
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When I finished, I divided the rag strips according to color:
… and then I started braiding them.
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| Natasha finds all craft projects suspicious |
Then I ran the whole thing through my sewing machine, laid it out on my floor, and voila!
It was lumpy and drastically asymmetrical. Dang it.
So I unpicked the whole thing, bought the biggest hook I could find, and tried crocheting the long braided rope:
Nope. Too small, too thick.
It took a lot less time to unravel the rug shape that time; although now I needed to unbraid the whole mess as well. Since some of the sewing from version1.0 criss-crossed the braids, this meant a lot of picking and ripping with my pointy scissors.
Finally, three days before Christmas I had the whole thing back to the point it was a month ago. Once more with the giant crochet hook, and this time it worked. A bit of blocking, a bit of steam, and I had a rug that fits nicely in Rachel’s kitchen:
Hmm. Although those raggedy edges bug me the more I look at them. I might do a bit more work on it the next time I babysit.
Master Class 
