Crafting How-Tos: Turn a rug into a wall hanging

I may have mentioned earlier that part of my going crazy at the end of this summer was because I spent a lot of time remodeling my dining room. It wasn't that the dining room was hideously ugly or out of date or not to my taste—I chose the carpet and curtains, after all—but it was the preferred site for my former feline's misbehaviors. So the carpet had an unfortunate aroma and needed to be replaced. We decided to install bamboo flooring, and so while the floor was bare, why not paint as well?

In choosing the new color scheme, I decided to take my inspiration from a beautiful silk rug we purchased during a visit to Turkey. Because of  prior unfortunate feline encounters, however, we decided the rug should be displayed on the wall, not the floor, safe from our cats' unerring ability to aim their vomit at the most difficult place to clean. The rug was only around 27x48 inches and weighed less than five pounds, making it a good candidate for a velcro mounting. I read on the interwebz that many museums prefer the velcro method, and it looked like a relatively easy thing I could do myself. Just sew a strip of velcro to the back of the carpet; attach the other side of velcro to a board; mount the board on the wall; and voila! Let the velcro work its magic!

These were the materials I used:

• 2-inch wide velcro, the width of my rug
• a wooden board, same width, that could be screwed into the wall
• enough undyed muslin to back the velcro and cover the board
• heavy upholstery/carpet thread in a color to blend with the rug
• a darning needle
• staple gun and staples

The muslin was necessary to protect the carpet from touching the velcro, untreated wood, or staples, possibly causing discoloration. So the first step was to sew the fuzzy side of the velcro to a piece of muslin. There should be around a quarter-inch of overlap on each side, and you can see my math went a little fuzzy and I ended up with a very small margin around my velcro. It was enough to hand-stitch it to the carpet, however, and that was the most labor-intensive part of the process. I very painstakingly used a darning needle and heavy upholstery thread to attach my velcro strip to the rug. I placed a stitch every three to four knots, and at around 16 knots per linear inch, that meant four to five stitches per inch. When placing the needle, I had to seek out the natural gaps in the weaving, and keep the stitches from crossing rows and becoming visible. Bending the carpet helped me find these spaces, and you can see from the next pictures that this careful placement helped the stitches disappear:

Yes, the stitches were that small.

I very carefully drew the thread to the other side...

... and poof! The thread is invisible!

It took me several hours and one very sore thumb, but I got the strip attached to the back of the carpet, as you see in the initial photo. Putting the velcro and muslin on the wooden board was much easier. I took out my trusty staple gun (used previously to recover the dining room chairs) and sproing! snap! bam! I had a board ready for mounting on the wall.

That's when I turned things over to TSU. Along with other important jobs, like Killing Ceiling Spiders and Changing Light Bulbs, he is in charge of Putting Things Up On Walls. He has special tools and it makes him feel useful. In this case he even took out little pieces of muslin before screwing the board in, then glued the muslin on top of the screws so they wouldn't touch the carpet.

All that was left was to put the two velcro parts together. It did take me a few tries and a level to get the carpet hanging exactly how I wanted it, and then I had to use a string to get the fringe on the top to flip behind the edge of the carpet, rather than hang down all willy-nilly. But that required minor effort, and the result was majorly cool!

Oooo, pretty, shiny carpet on the wall! See how the teal-ish accents in the carpet are picked up by the light blue paint? My cats will have to work extremely hard to try to vomit on this baby!

I was very pleased with how this turned out, considering it was something I'd never tried doing before. I don't think it would work with the 4x6-foot carpet we have, as it's too heavy, but in that case the carpet has turned into a sofa drape, visible yet somewhat protected from our varmints.

I'm not lazy, really...

... and I'm not ignoring the blog, either. I've just been so busy I've found it difficult to carve out the time to write something. Ideas have been sparse, too. I posted Word Nerd and quilting entries not too long ago, and my Remedial Lit Project has bogged down in the 800-plus pages of Anna Karenina. I've had to renew it three times (that's nine weeks, folks); not because I'm avoiding it—I'm actually enjoying it—but because I haven't had a lot of free time to read anything that's not a biography for a piece I'm writing. I've been spending lots of my time either working or chauffeuring, and those activities don't make good fodder for blogging. (Unless you want me to rant for two paragraphs about my nemesis the Tonda school traffic light, which invariably turns red on each of our six daily encounters.)

The only thing of any interest I've really done in the last couple of weeks is redo our front room. We're having a little (okay, not so little) litterbox issue, so I thought replacing the targeted sofas and carpet might help. I should have taken a "before" picture, but I didn't. You'll have to just extrapolate from this picture: blue carpet on the floor, and two light blue sofas (this one and a larger one) against the two walls. In addition to being a target for the cat, the sofas were over 10 years old and one had been broken by Boy when he was about six or seven, not being built to withstand a running jump onto its frame.

So we put the sofas out by the curb, at different times. One was scavenged, we think by the neighbor across the street despite our warning that it might have an odor issue (although we had removed the covers and washed the cushions with bleach); the other was consumed by the garbage truck (and wasn't that fun, watching it being broken in half in one big gollup). We moved all the furniture out, including my great-grandmother's antique (ie very HEAVY) piano, and ripped up the carpet and padding. Then TSU and I spent a day, plus any cartilege we might have left in our knees, putting in laminate flooring. It really was as easy to snap in as it looks in commercials, although getting the last row to click was a little tricky. The end result looked pretty good.

Next we headed out to Ikea, as it is close (ten minutes away) and their furniture is relatively inexpensive and in a style to our taste. They had a leather loveseat advertised for only $399, and on this visit it was actually in stock and looked like it might fit in my SUV if we left the lid ajar but tied down. (We took a tape measure and actually measured it, unlike the trio of coeds who spent five minutes in checkout before us trying to find the UPC on their mattress and then restack their cart, only to discover when they got out to their truck that it wasn't going to fit in the covered bed. I wonder if they finally figured out they could use the luggage rack on top; we didn't stick around to see.) We brought our prize home, followed the easiest Ikea assembly instructions ever (screw in four legs), and brought back in all the other furniture. And voila! We have a real room again, only now it looks light and open and organized. Now I just need to go remodel another room—the one where the evil cat will be confined until we figure out her problem. Sigh. It looks like it'll be a while before I find more free time for serious blogging.

You CAN get fresh honey-do in winter...

The time between Christmas and New Year's is a weird one for me. Not only is Boy home all day (tragically without his Xbox, which pooped out on him just before vacation started), but so is TSU, whose office closes down for the week. I'm trying to keep a semblance of my routine—I have an assignment due in two weeks, and my critique group needs feeding—but it's difficult when other people are wanting to share vacation with you. (I know, how tragic, having real people giving me excuses to procrastinate.)

Anyway, TSU uses the free time to play with his woodworking toys, and finally finished the sewing table I asked him to make for me. When he was ready to bring it upstairs, I cleared everything off the old folding table I used ... and then I stopped. He said he would replace the old wall sockets (they're loose and plugs always fall out—a real pain when you're ironing) when he repainted the room. So why not repaint the room now? I picked out some colors, and he did the rest:


Ain't it purty? (The white is a picture railing, which came with the house.) And isn't my new table glorious? Plenty of room to cut out fabric or quilt a queen size, and shelves for all my project boxes! Nice to know I'm not the only creative person in the family:

Sorry, ladies, I'm not sharing.