THE NEXT GREAT IDEA

I’m so glad Mother’s Day is finally here which means it’s nearly over. Don’t get me wrong – I love the concept; it’s the hype I can’t stand. All I really need to know is that my children are well and happy.

“What’s your next great idea,” asks the crafting website. I guess they know me pretty well. I’m in the midst of several next great ideas while several of my last sit and wait.

Mike literally wears his jeans out. The right knee becomes the first of many patches. Hunting pants get torn in strange places, some of them unpatchable. Suffice it to say, I have a huge pile of worn out jeans and hunting pants. At first, I thought I could use the fabric for doll jeans, but it’s really too heavy for that. (And besides, delightful denim options are available at JoAnn’s.) Then, I struck on the idea of using them to make rag rugs.

So, during our last town stay, I ripped some of Mike’s old jeans into strips to crochet into rugs. Of course, my jeans also wear out but in a different way – the fronts wear through or the elastic gives out. They are also candidates for a rag rug, but the denim in mine is lighter than in Mike’s, so that’s a different rug.

I was 15 or so when out of the blue, my mother assigned me to make a rag rug out of Grandma Portfors’ nylon nightgowns. This was odd for several reasons. She did not ask me to do it but handed me the nightgowns and a wooden crochet hook. The nightgowns were perfectly good – lovely, in fact – half a dozen in pastel shades. It was probably a shame to cut them up. (Frankly, I was surprised that my grandmother would wear such feminine gowns. I mean – wasn’t she cold? I wear cozy pajamas.)

I don’t know how it came to Mother to make a rug of them or why she decided I should do it. She had me cut the gowns into strips, and then she started an oval rug in single crochet and showed me how to increase on the curves to keep it flat. The finished rug wasn’t very big, and I wished I had more nightgowns. It found a place beside my bed, and I have a vague memory that we eventually threw it away. All that’s left of that project is the wooden crochet hook, but for my jeans project, I’ll need to use a big “Q.”

It takes a lot of fabric to make a rag rug of any size. The strips are quite short, and I opt ed to sew them together – time-consuming and tedious. Once I began to crochet, it only took a couple of hours to crochet the “yarn” from four pair of pants into this piece which is not yet serviceable. How long it will take or how big it will be is unknown. For now, I’m glad that the stack of old jeans is disappearing. I hope the rug(s) are useful in the house, but if not, Bess can use them. KW