Creating a Homemade Tweed Red-Striped Rug

In Knitting Fabric Rugs (Storey Publishing, 2015), Karen Tiede teaches that all you need to create an artistic floor covering is a cutting wheel and mat, a pair of size 10 knitting needles, fabric, and her innovative technique for creating stunning designs quickly and easily. In this excerpt your will learn to create a charming tweed rug that is sure to brighten any room.

You can do some amazing things with basic stripes when you plan color changes and control the number of rows. I knit this rug, Tweedy Stripes, in reds because the red stash was overflowing and I needed to reduce the volume. The strong reds of medium value used in Stripes #3 and #5 are an especially easy-to-collect shade of red. Because I wanted to use as much red as possible, I tied in tiny bits of accent colors, rather than blocks or stripes that would use a color other than red. The accent colors are similar in value to the stripe I knit them into. Each individual strip of accent color ranges from 12 inches to 20 inches long, to create variety in the size of the tweedy bits.

Because I knit to length rather than to a row count, the sections in the middle are a little too short. (The outside stripes have 34 garter-stitch ridges, while the inside stripes have only 32.) For a neater edge, instead of “knitting to fit,” count garter-stitch ridges so that all strips match more accurately in length. Laying pieces on top of each other to check length, particularly when one of the sections is still on the needle, does not give an accurate result. The directions below suggest counting garter-stitch ridges instead, so that your sections are the same length.

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