Pot Holder Area Rugs

Pot Holder Area Rugs

I recently had a chance to attend a workshop where we learned how to make pot holder style area rugs.  Chances are, when you were a kid you took bands of colored fabric and wrapped them around a plastic peg to make a colorful hand woven pot holder.  As a child it was a fun craft project that you often gave to a parent.  Now as an adult you can use that same technique and create a unique, one of a kind, area rug out of recycled materials =  your worn out clothes.

Crispina Ffrench created this technique and has been creating pot holder rugs for over 20 years.  Crispina now teaches workshops out of her gorgeous converted church in Pittsfield, MA.  She is a self-proclaimed recycling junkie.  Whether reusing old sweater to create quilts, Christmas stockings, or area rugs, she doesn’t let any scrap of fabric go to waste.  At the workshop I found the process remarkably easy, and as a side benefit, once you learn the basics, it even has a meditative quality.

The process is simple:

*Cut up your old clothes to create loops

*Hang loops on the appropriate size loom

*Weave loops

*Finish it off by weaving the ends together and off the loom

As an interior designer I see great potential in these rugs.  The finished look would have great application in just about any non-formal room of your home.  The overall look is causal but can go from country to modern in design.  A few of the things I like most about these pot holder rugs are that you can make them any size you want, from a small mat to a 12 x 16 large area rug, and it uses all recycled materials.

The possibilities are endless with the look and feel of both color choices and materials.  I chose to use a black, white and grey color scheme and used mostly T-shirts.  My good friend Kris who took the class with me used mostly sweaters in neutral tones with pops of color woven throughout the rug.  The completed projects as you can see are very different.   In our class of about 10 students it was interesting to see how everyone took their rug in their own direction and each one was completely unique.

I enjoyed learning this new technique from Crispina.  She was a great teacher, and I would recommend her workshops.  I plan to continue to make these rugs in my spare time.  I look forward to experimenting with the bits of scrap fabric that I have collected over the years from past interior design jobs.

I hope these new photos help answer some of the questions I have received about making the loom.  I purchased this loom from Crispina after taken her class.

For more information on Crispina Ffrench and her rug-making classes, please see crispina.com .

Heather McManus

December 6, 2012