T-shirt Yarn Project Reveal, Part 1

A Circular Rug

I've been busily making my t-shirt rug project and can now reveal the first part of the rug!  If you have been following along with previous blogs, it will now make sense as to why I was madly cutting up so many t-shirts!  After weeks of collecting, washing and cutting shirts it was super exciting to finally get stitching!     

A rough template of the colour band order followed is pictured below, traveling from right to left with some lines of yarn doing more than one band.  The estimated gauge from my test swatches was about 2 cm per round.  The plan was for the finished rug to be between 120 to 150cm wide, a size that would work well for the room it would live in.  For the rug to be halfway between this range it would need approximately 33 rounds!

(To estimate the number of rounds for a given size circular rug; find the radius and divide by the stitching gauge:  So for a rug diameter of 135cm, the radius= 135cm divided by 2cm= 67.5cm.  Then the radius of 67.5cm divided by 2cm gauge= approx 33 rounds):

A Round & Around

I'd never crocheted in the round before, so spent quite a significant amount of time practicing making magic circles and working out how to change rows and colours seamlessly.  It took awhile to get the hang of it and I ended up having to restart a few times!

My cat Matisse seems to approve of this attempt and happily claimed it for herself lol!:

Ring a Ring a Rosie

I didn't really follow a pattern!  Initially I worked off something similar to the formula for a perfect single crotchet circle.  Although, I started with 12 stitches in my magic circle rather than 6, due to the bulky nature of the yarn and the large hook. After the first 10 or so rounds, following rounds were increased when corners started to curl up, which is an indication an increase is needed.  If a round was increased when it didn't need to be, waves/buckles would appear to indicate increases were not required.  It was a bit of trial and error process, but it became easier to gauge what to do as it progressed.  As long as everything was sitting flat it was alright to progress to the next round! There were also constraints in terms of the amount of yarn balls available for each round/colour, so I tended to try to increase in rounds where there was more yarn available.  After the first 10 or so rounds were completed, I increased every couple of rows (when needed) by putting two single crotchets in every 5th stitch ( in other words every 5th and 6th stitch would go in the same hole).  A 15.75mm crochet hook was used, as this hook gave the best results with the 1.5 inch strips of yarn used.

 The first 12 rounds; about 48cm wide:

20 rounds; about 80 cm wide.  Outer row is buckling/becoming slightly wavy, so I redid it without increases before moving onto the next round!: 

22 Rounds; about 90cm wide:

I'll be back with more progress later this month!

Happy stitching, xxx