Project Progress: Kitchen Update Week 10

This is one of those projects that you think is going to be a simple project, but is not a simple project, but is instead a very hard, very long project that only looks very simple. Yeah.

On the other hand, this project is 100% free. Not "free" as in "sometime in the past I bought this stuff and am now getting around to using it" free, but free as in "I did not pay a cent for the materials" free. Except for the thread. I did buy that.

My mom worked for a while for an swanky furniture/interior design shop and she brought home loads and loads of sample books, some of which she passed along to me.

So, a few weeks ago, I went through some of my books and took them apart and got all the dark greens and blues and cut them into rough strips and sewed them together and started braiding them to make a wide-striped rag rug for my kitchen. I'm going to have three bands of dark and three bands of light neutrals.


That's a total of 25 braided strips and 24 seams between them.

Some of the ones I haven't done, hanging out in my laundry basket:

I'm hand-stitching the braids together and that is what is taking me forever. It takes me 1.5 hours to do one seam, approximately.

No clue why I'm so incredibly slow, besides the fact that I really want it to stick together and some of this stuff is hard to sew through. Thimble on hand at all times. This is serious hand-sewing here.

I've done seven seams so far.

You can see I'm getting much better.

Some one please threaten to take away all my sugar and Dr. Pepper for a month if I even consider redoing that first one I did on the left that's all wonky. Please.