Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Inspired at Last!

I have been going back and forth with potential rug design ideas since I first started my recycled rug project. I wanted to make it fairly simple, but interesting as well. I looked up rag rugs on the Internet and saw a ton of different rug styles in all shapes and sizes, but none really did it for me. My style issue hinges on the fact that I have two very large balls of red “yarn” and small ones for my green and blue balls (hee, hee). Not knowing how this would knit up, I was concerned about trying to balance these larger ones in the pattern. Well, it finally hit me…I will use the large red balls to knit a narrow strip that will run from the top to the bottom of the rug. Then, I will pick up the stitches from the long sides of the red strip and will work randomly alternating stripes of blue and green away from the center to build the meat of the rug. I have a couple small balls of red as well that I thought I could add as an accent in this section part way to the edge of the rug. This way the rug will be one solid piece to help give it strength, but the varied stitch directions will add a little interest – it won’t be just a striped rug. Now, the only thing I need to do is learn how to pick up stitches from the side…where’s my SnB book?

1 comment:

The Stitchin' Sheep said...

If you slip the edge stitches (the first and last stitch) on each row you want to pick up side stitches on, that makes them easier to find and pick up when you need to do it later. I hope that makes sense. That's how I've seen it suggested when you're picking up side stitches for making the heel of a sock. I figure that could work for you.