Have been truly inspired by the re-strategies I blogged about earlier, check them here.

To check on my options to re-anything I went through all the storage space we have – closets, cupboards, kitchen drawers, you name it, we’ve got it – and did a long-overdue check: is the stuff we keep in there stuff we want in our lives, or not? As a result I moved small mountains to better locations in our home, to  the charity shop and to the local waste disposal station. I learned that there are things even thriftshops are unwilling to have, like boxes of videotapes that were made obsolete by Netflix  and cookery books made redundant by the Internet.  

I also  systemised our stamps and sorted our socks …. yes, I went the whole hog. After two weeks the craze slowed down, and my family members found it was safe to approach me again …. 

Some of the stuff that survived the purge is to be repurposed. First of all I made a lighting-cum-charging solution for over our kitchen table – we use our laptops there a lot, and the cables going to wall sockets were a pain. So I used a big black wooden stick as a base to fix three clamp lamps on, suspended this from the ceiling, added two extension cords and connected all to a power strip on the ceiling. The whole thing cost 20 euro’s and many problems have been solved. Score! 

Then I re-connected with my sewing machine, and started making a woolen blanket – made obsolete by the introduction of duvets – into a rug, see the first image below. Spent a few hours on this, totally happy and absorbed. The whole thing is now being felted by my washing machine – I do like quick and easy fixes – and will either result in a nice-looking rug or in a total disaster. Will post pictures either way. 

Later: added the ‘after’ image – a smashing success! 

Vital Statistics

white blanket, mixture of wool and acryllic, 2.50 m x 2.30, weighs app 4 kg

Cut a base that is 112 x 60 cm , weighs 460 gram  and is 0,672 m square
Cut strips 11 cm wide, fringed them on both sides, then sewed them on the base.
First and last strip one-sided fringe, all the others double sided.

So 112 cm base length covered in strips 3 cm apart => 37  strips of 60 long and 11 wide 
So needed for strips approx 2,4 m square  

Ratio  base : strips in square meters = 0,672 : 2,600 =appr 1 : 4   so divide up next blankets in five parts, one for base, the rest for strips.

Resulting rug weighs 2 kg before washing. So strips are 2000 – 460 = 1540 grams
Ratio base : strips in weight = 460 : 1540  =  approx 1 : 4  so this fits the square meters. 

After washing: smashing!

Dimensions 54 x 97  which was  60 x 112  so shrinkage width is 90 % and length is 87 % 

So calculate with shrinkage between 85 and 90 % 

Later: keep 10 cm overlap for second rug part

For future reference: this is how the thread is spooled on the industrial-size sewing machine: