At Home with the Artist: DIY Basket and Rug with T-Shirts!

I've been wanting a rug for our bedroom for awhile, but rugs are so expensive! So when I found that my husband had several boxes of old t shirts stashed at my in-laws and they were trying to get rid of them, I of course took them right away!

The first tutorials I followed to make a rug with t shirts can be found here and here. In the tutorial, they want on and on about keeping everything lose so that it won't become a basket instead of a rug. Man is it true! Good luck! Mine went a little bit like this:

I got about this far before I had to admit that I was making a basket instead of a rug. I sewed and picked out the stitches three times and I still had a basket at the end of that last attempt. So I went with it, finished it up and now have a cute basket for things under my easel.

But I still wanted to make that rug! So I followed a different tutorial found on one of my favorite blogs, A Beautiful Mess. This project only involved weaving and no braiding or sewing. Instead of using sheeting like they suggest, I used t-shirt material since I still had so much of it. 

Marked off the board as suggest.

Strung large pieces of cut up t-shirts onto my 'loom'.

Began weaving with another t-shirt string.

 Almost done weaving the whole rug!

Tying off the ends.

Look at the finished rug at the end of our bed! Some day I would like to make a larger one for the office, but I think with the multiple tries for the first one and then this one, I'm all rugged out for awhile!