Braided Jeans Rug: Preparing Strips

Video Transcript

"Okay, we will need three strips to start our braided rug. And we'll probably be using about four or five pairs of old jeans in order to make one decent sized little area rug. Now when you are making your jean strips, jeans come in all different colors of blue jean. So you want to think about that and use that as your design elements. Some very light colored jeans can add a nice look. You can mix them up with a dark color. Or you can just have one braid of just light and work that into the center. And the next pair use a very dark so that you have a dark outline on a white. So you want to think about that. While you are cutting your strips, you can sort them as to how you want to use them. Next we are going to put our three strips together. And you'll need to secure that for the beginning. You'll need to secure that. And you just take with a needle and thread and do a few stitches there. Now one thing you want to make sure is that your three strips when you start are not the same size. Okay? You don't want them to all end at the same time. Because when a strip ends, we are going to add another piece to it and there will be a bulky section. So we'll be adding a piece like this and so it will be doubled over for a little while and so it will be a real bulky section. So you don't want all three strips to end at the same point and then we'll have one big huge bulky section. You want them to end at different times. So here I have a short one. And I will be joining another one. And then as I go down, I just want to make sure that these also do not end at the same time. Another thing that you want to prepare before we start our braiding, is if you have ripped the jeans like I have in many places, there's a lot of extra strings here. So you want to trim out these extra strings because what will happen is as you're braiding, they'll just get very tangled up and you'll have difficulty with the braiding. So just go through and any of this excess strings, you want to get rid off. Just snip them out. Now when you cut the strips, you don't end up with all of these, all of these strings."