sunshine

beautiful, gorgeous, sunny day with my sweet frankie.

aidan’s valentines 2013

aidan decided to make his own valentines from scratch this year. he cut them out of brown fred meyer bags, used a heart punch and glued a starburst candy to each one. i love that kid!

rug therapy

on new year’s day, i put away all the christmas decorations and cleaned the house furiously, ready to start 2013 with a fresh environment & perspective.  i  rearranged the front room, to better accommodate the really cool, giant mod bean bags the boys received for christmas.  it looked fantastic, although the room was screaming for a modern shag rug to complement the mid century look.  so, i started looking at rugs.  i must admit that it became a bit of an obsession, fueled even more by my lack of funds to purchase one.  while perusing pictures of rugs i could never afford, i stumbled upon a fantastic tutorial for making your own at xoelle.  and so it began…

i decided to make a 5′ x 5′ rug and purchased 2 pieces of 36″ x 60″ rug canvas on amazon for $13 each.  i needed about 100 cotton tees to make this rug and procured them all for free.  the rug on the tutorial was all one color and i wanted to have slightly different shades.  most of the tees were white or light in color, but i had a bunch of bright orange too.  first, i cut the ribbed collars, sleeves and hem off of all the shirts.  next, i dyed the tees in small batches, trying to group the tees by color.  i used idye by jacquard and was really pleased with the results.  for the lighter colored shirts, i used two different grays, gunmetal & silver gray. for the batch of bright orange shirts, i used the royal blue to create gray.  this batch was difficult and i ended up over-dyeing in silver gray to get the final color i wanted.  all in all, i ended up with a range of 5 different shades.  i then started on the arduous task of cutting all the dyed material into 1″ x 4″ strips.  i worked on it a few hours a day and it took several weeks.

finally, it was time to start actually making the rug.  i found a vintage rug hook for $1 and got to work!

the first 5′ row took me an hour.  now, i can get a row done in 30 minutes.  with over 200 rows, it will take about 100 hours to complete the rug. here’s my progress so far…

i think it is going to look and feel amazing when it is finally done!  it’s very calming to work on and i am using it as my new form of therapy in 2013.  i’ll post a picture when it’s complete!