Embroidered Rugs – DIY Pattern

Embroidered rugs!! The new rage for flooring. Get yourself a cross-stitch designer rug by simply embroidering your own or a new area rug.

A coarsely woven cotton rug makes just a great embroidery canvas to add splendour to your floor. This rug is perfect for a sunroom, living room or bedroom. Design yourself a nice pattern or use the one shown here.

Materials Needed to Make Your Own Embroidered Rug

1. A typical inexpensive IKEA rug, or an equivalent coarsely woven rug from another vendor. I am a sucker for natural fibres, and so I am envisioning this rug made with 100% jute: Area Rugs Beige 4′ x 6′ 100% Jute Woven Chunky Loop. At $64 for a 4×6″, it’s quite very inexpensive rug.

2. You will need 4 colors of t-shirt yarn. These days, t-shirt yarn is called ‘Zpagetti’, and for sale in upmarket yarn stores. I highly recommend you recycle some of your own old t-shirts instead. Let’s recycle yarn. You don’t need that much.

3/4. You will need a supersized XL embroidery and crochet hook. Get yourself something like this: Embroidery Hook Crochet Needle Large

How to Embroider a Rug – Tutorial

1. If you like the rug as-is, you can simply copy the design as you see it in the picture. Otherwise, your first step is to work out the colors that you would like your rug, i.e. what is the color scheme for your room. Then choose 4 –7 complementary colors at make the rug blend well into the remainder of the décor.

2. Look around in the room and choose a pattern, shape or theme that you see. Enlarge it, make it smaller, link it, play with it. Build it into a design for your rug.

3. Once you are ready with your design on paper, it is time to transfer it (roughly) onto the larger rug, using a sewing pencil. Be as exact as you like, but whimsical is best for this kind of undertaking. Rugs like a sense of natural variety. It’s like either walking on paper or walking on sand. The look of sand and the variations in color of the sand is so much nicer than a crisp lined paper rug. For that reason, occasionally make uneven ends.

4. If you think that enlarging and transferring your design from your copy paper-size to entire rug size, you may wish to break the design down into measured sections. This will help a lot.

5. Get yourself this free embroidery stitches eBook to learn how to make the various embroidery stitches you see in this rug. They are easy.

Furthermore, for the soft yellow, red and violet ‘3d pop-up flowers’, simply cut strips of yarn that are between 15 to 20 cm long. Fold the strips in half and pull a loop with your crochet hook through the carpet. Then, pull the ends through that loop and pull the loop itself tight. And voila. You have 3d ‘roses’ on your carpet.

6. Start with putting one color yarn all over the rug. This way, you can right away see if you have transferred the design correctly and adjust things along the way so that your designer rug will look balanced at the end. Add color after color and build up your ‘art work’ so to speak. This rug should be finished in no time.

rug image credit | info source: https://www.ariadneathome.nl (Dutch)