FO: Mandala Rug

Bear with me.  This was a bit of an impulse project.

We are floor-sitters in my house.  Ever since I was a kid, I would sit on the floor.  For fun, for study, for movies.  I love Japanese and Korean restaurants where you take off your shoes and sit on the floor.  I feel like it's better for your back and posture to sit up unaided, and you can sit in lotus or half lotus and give your hips a good stretch that you don't get from sitting in a chair.

Yes, bean bag chairs are comfy but not exactly classy decor, and building a low padded platform like I saw in the Tokapi palace in Istanbul is kind of out of the question in a rental flat.  

I was wandering the local TK Maxx (which inexplicably is called TJ Maxx in the states).  I occasionally find yarn here- last year I ended up with oodles of Rowan Kidsilk Creation to make oodles of ruffle scarves with.  Baby mohair and silk are things you should never turn down, even in novelty yarn form.  This go-round, they had oodles of Boodles- what they call "textile yarn".  It is stripped-out bits of leftover t-shirt fabric.  Most people know it (or have made their own) to make rag rugs.  I picked up all the good cones of colors I could find- it was tough as they didn't exactly have a brilliant selection, but for that price, I made do with what they had.  I was going to make a cushy little meditation rug.  

In the end, I found enough white, grey and red to do the job.  A stop by the little craft department at Morely's, my underrated independent neighborhood department store in Brixton and I had a 20mm crochet hook to wrap my hand around.  

A few hours later, I had this:

If I had more yarn, I could have kept going.  I did run out of red (oops!) and had to finish the row with grey, but it's not the most atrocious crafting crime of the century.  One day, I find enough good colors, I would love to do a softly graduated color rug.  The whole thing cost £12, plus another 2 squid for the crochet hook.

It was fun to make, and a real upper-body workout to wrestle with super thick stretchy cotton fabric yarn.  Roar.  It got heavy quite quickly, and a gator-wrestling match is the only thing I can think to compare this with once the first few rounds were done.  It's so cushy, too- your ass doesn't fall asleep at all, even after a sitting through and entire movie.  I put it next to my coffee bench, plop down in the centre bit and type away until I'm out of things to say.

Dear diary, it's now been 8 months, 2 weeks and 3 days since my last pedicure.  Not that I'm counting.

I used 4 cones of boodles yarn to make a rug that's about 3 feet across.  This is a pattern you could go on and on and on with and consume an entire room with if you felt so inclined.  It's a free pattern, too, and they have a great step-by-step tutorial to go along with it, so even the most basic of crafters could whip this up in no time.

It makes me feel peaceful and happy to have this around.  If it didn't weight more than a freight train, I'd be making more of them as gifts.  For now, I'll just quietly hoard any more good cones of Boodles that I might find.