Assignment 10: Make a Rug By Maxine

Assignment 10: Make a Rug

Title: Rug in progress...

Provided by: Frits Hage

By: Maxine

Episode 10 instructions: 
1. Gather old textiles (clothes, bed sheets, etc.)
2. Make a rug
3. Share your journey of making the rug and what you do on it

     In general when I do art I use two mediums, the first being that I draw, this is more the medium of my past though it is still one close to my heart. I love drawing an image by hand with pen and ruler, then scanning it into the computer, redrawing it in photoshop and spending hours coloring it... thats why I was initially excited by assignment 6... even though i haven't approached it yet... 

     My other medium, my current medium is cloth. I sew costumes, dresses cloaks and clothing. A lot of the every day clothes I where I made, and some of the special stuff too ( my wedding dress...). So when you are looking for cloth I have it... and old pieces of cloth have meaning to me. I see meaning behind this assignment coming to me from the places you take the old cloth from. 

     Here we are supposed to be reusing old cloth that once has a purpose and currently does not. I happened to have the perfect box for that. 

      That was a box of mostly towels that has been in my closet since I moved in here. When you are young and you move into a new home (doesn't matter if its like the fourth house you have lived in away from your parents a lot) you get (or well... at least I got... but I am pretty confident this happened to my cosen as well) all sorts of old stuff your relatives don't need that they figure you can use... I have way too many towels/sheets... 

     The story of these pieces are a path of the places I have lived since I first moved out. The Red fabric is from jogging pants I had in high school... I really liked the top that matched them... The sheet that I used in the center is from my grandmothers house when I was little... all the parts to her guest room matched it... the pillow cases, the curtains, the comforter.  That Green piece of cloth you see in the image above is the sheet from my room in the first apartment I lived on my own. A curtain from that same room is in the box too (though at some point in time I lost one... so I only have one curtan...). This box has cloth that speaks to me of the past. 

     I started this over a few times... the first time I tried to use the red peace that you can hardly see... its from jogging pants... so its a thick cloth but not as thick as the towels... the second try worked a lot better and it was with a sheet.

     It was very difficult to move from the sheet fabric to the jogging pants... I suggest when you know you are running out after a big piece like that to make things loose... I also started off trying to tie the different fabrics together... this didn't work. I actually found that they stay fine if you just start with a loop. The start is not easy... I really don't know if I was doing it right, but I just grabbed old parts and connected the new to it... around and around... the edge now works fine, and its mostly a circle... it already is getting big fast... and my apartment is nowhere as big as a studio... so I don't even expect to use all that is in my box there... But I have a plan now... I'll show you when its done. 

     One other thing that I noticed is that it DOES get easier as you go... and once you start to get frustrated put it down for a bit then come back. I stopped for a bit here before adding the brown towle in the top photo, stopping and starting again made things easier.