Getting out of a rut with a rug

My loom has been populated with various kitchen towel warps for the entire month of October in order to fulfill gallery requests for holiday inventory and and for friends’ gift giving intentions. After some 50 yards of weaving the same pattern (I did change colors in the warps, which helped a little bit), some of the magic really started to wear off. It is a nice pattern, and one I enjoy weaving, but too much of anything can get tedious. It was a bit of a struggle to finish weaving the last 5 yards of fabric. (Actually, it was a SIGNIFICANT struggle).

Blue and teal kitchen towel fabric on the loom

I decided to take a quick holiday from production weaving and design and make something for our home in an effort to get out of this little rut. I can’t even remember the last time I wove something for our home. Our placemat drawer is populated with the “seconds” that didn’t pass my QA parameters, and many of the kitchen towels we use at home are a bit runty. So I’ve decided to weave a rug! My last rug was a plain weave rag rug that I made twenty years ago and, alas, the dog tore it up. However, I do have a snapshot of the rug in process that I keep with me in my weaving workshop:

Weaving a rag rug with Mommy (probably in year 2001)

My boys used to like to help me weave back when we lived in Minnesota. They were so little! It has been a while since they looked so excited about sitting on a loom bench.

I will share photos of the rug if it turns out reasonably well. I think it is good to mix things up every once in a while, just to keep things from getting stale. My rug isn’t going to be anything elaborate, just a rosepath rag rug. I have some old blue pillowcases and a queen sized cotton sheet that is threadbare around the stitching, so I thought these would be good candidates for weft material. I don’t even have a temple/stretcher to use to assist me in the weaving of the rug but I’m throwing caution to the wind.