Kitchen Rag Rug! – Making Things is Awesome
There is something quietly revolutionary about turning worn-out fabric into something beautiful. A kitchen rag rug sits at the intersection of thrift, creativity, and genuine usefulness — a handmade object that solves a real problem while also looking like you put a lot of thought into your decor. If you have ever stood at the sink washing dishes, wishing the floor beneath your feet felt a little softer, or if you have a basket of old t-shirts and tea towels that you cannot quite bring yourself to throw away, this project was made for you.
Making a rag rug is one of the oldest textile crafts in existence. For centuries, people have been cutting up worn clothing and weaving, braiding, or crocheting it into floor coverings. In Colonial America, rag rugs were a necessity. Fabric was expensive, nothing was wasted, and every strip of cloth had a second life waiting for it. Today, we make them for different reasons — sometimes sustainability, sometimes nostalgia, sometimes just the pure pleasure of making something with our hands — but the fundamental appeal has not changed. You start with something old and end up with something new. That transformation never gets old.
This post is going to walk you through everything you need to know to make your own kitchen rag rug, from choosing your materials and understanding different techniques to finishing your rug so it actually stays in place on the floor and lasts for years. Whether you are a total beginner or someone who has tried a bit of weaving or crochet before, you will find a method here that works for you.
Why the Kitchen Is the Perfect Place for a Rag Rug
Before we get into the how, let’s talk about the why. The kitchen is a room that takes a beating. Floors get wet from the sink, greasy from cooking, dirty from foot traffic, and scratched from chair legs. A lot of people gravitate toward commercial anti-fatigue mats, which are fine but tend to look a bit clinical and wear out in unsatisfying ways — they peel, they crack, they turn yellow around the edges.
A handmade rag rug, by contrast, is durable in a different way. It is repairable. If a section wears out, you can patch it or re-work that area. It is also washable — most rag rugs made from cotton fabric can go right in the washing machine, which is important in a kitchen where spills are guaranteed. And it is yours. Nobody else has one exactly like it.
The kitchen is also a place where a little handmade warmth goes a long way. It is a functional room, but it is also often the heart of the home. A colorful rag rug in front of the sink, or under the kitchen table, or in front of the stove adds a layer of personality that a store-bought mat simply cannot replicate.
Gathering Your Materials
One of the best things about rag rugs is that you probably already have most of what you need. Here is what to look for.
Fabric strips: The raw material of any rag rug is fabric cut into strips. For a kitchen rug, cotton is your best friend. It is absorbent, durable, and machine washable. Old t-shirts are ideal — they are soft, they have a natural stretch that makes them easy to work with, and they come in a rainbow of colors. Cotton bed sheets (especially the ones that are worn thin in the middle), pillowcases, tea towels, and lightweight cotton shirts all work beautifully. You can also buy new cotton fabric from a fabric store and cut it up, which gives you more control over your color palette but costs more money. Denim from old jeans adds wonderful texture and is extremely durable, though it is heavier than most cotton fabrics and will make a firmer, thicker rug. Avoid synthetic fabrics like polyester or nylon if you can — they are slippery, do not absorb well, and can feel unpleasant underfoot.
Tools: Your tools depend entirely on which technique you choose (more on that in a moment), but the basics include a good pair of fabric scissors, a ruler or rotary cutter and cutting mat if you want to speed up the strip-cutting process, and whatever tool your chosen method requires — a crochet hook, a loom, or just your hands for braiding.
A non-slip rug pad: Not strictly necessary for making the rug, but essential for using it safely in the kitchen. Rag rugs are charming, but they can be slippery on hard floors, and the kitchen is the last place you want to slip. Pick up a roll of non-slip rug pad material from any home goods store and cut it to size.
Preparing Your Fabric Strips
However you choose to make your rug, you will need to cut your fabric into strips first. This preparation step is meditative once you get into a rhythm, but it can feel tedious if you approach it wrong.
For t-shirts and knit fabrics, cut strips about an inch to an inch and a half wide. Because knit fabric curls on itself when cut, you do not need to do anything special with the edges — the fabric will naturally roll into a soft tube shape, which is perfect for rag rugs. Cut straight across the body of the shirt (removing the hem and the seams first), and you will end up with continuous loops. You can leave these as loops or cut through one side to create a single long strip.
For woven cotton fabrics like sheets and pillowcases, cut strips slightly wider — about one and a half to two inches — because the edges will fray. Some people love the fringed, floppy look this creates. Others prefer to fold the edges in as they work to make the strips look cleaner and more finished. Neither approach is wrong; it is just an aesthetic choice.
To make your strips easier to work with during a long crafting session, wind them into balls as you cut them. If you want to join strips together into one long continuous piece before you start, you can do so by cutting a small slit near the end of each strip and looping them together.
Choosing Your Technique
There are three main methods for making a rag rug, and each produces a different look and feel. None of them requires any specialized experience, though some have a gentler learning curve than others.
Braiding is the simplest method and probably the most ancient. You braid three strands of fabric together, just like braiding hair, and then coil the braid into an oval or round shape, stitching the rows together as you go. The result is a dense, sturdy rug with a classic look — you have seen braided rugs your whole life without necessarily knowing what they were. The disadvantage of braiding is that the stitching-together part requires either hand sewing or a lacing technique that some people find fiddly. But if you want to make a rug with zero tools, braiding is your method.
Crocheting is probably the most popular technique right now for making rag rugs, and for good reason. If you know even basic crochet stitches (and even if you do not, they take about fifteen minutes to learn), you can make a beautiful rug relatively quickly. You work with a large crochet hook — typically size N, P, or Q, which is quite chunky — and crochet your fabric strips in the round to create a flat oval or round rug. The single crochet stitch is all you need. The result is a slightly textured, flexible rug that lies flat and looks neat and intentional.
Weaving requires a loom, but the loom does not have to be fancy. People make rag rugs on large rigid heddle looms, on floor looms, or on simple frame looms that you can build yourself from four pieces of wood and some nails. Woven rag rugs have a very different look from braided or crocheted ones — flatter, more geometric, with a warp-and-weft grid structure that can create stripes, checks, or other patterns depending on how you arrange your colors. If you are interested in weaving as a craft, a rag rug is one of the best first projects because the thick fabric strips are forgiving and progress is fast.
For this post, we are going to go into the most detail on the crocheted method, since it is the most accessible for beginners and requires the least equipment.
How to Crochet a Kitchen Rag Rug
Start by joining your fabric strips into one long continuous strand and winding it into a ball. For a rug that is about 20 by 30 inches — a nice size for in front of a kitchen sink — you will need roughly three to four pounds of fabric strips, depending on how tightly you crochet.
Begin with a chain of about 20 stitches. This chain becomes the center of your oval rug — the longer your starting chain, the longer and more oval your finished rug will be. If you want a rounder rug, start with a shorter chain of 8 to 10 stitches.
Work single crochet stitches into the chain, and when you reach the end, crochet three stitches into the very last chain stitch (this allows you to turn the corner without puckering). Then work back along the other side of the chain. When you reach the starting end, again work three stitches into the corner chain stitch, then slip stitch to join and begin your next round.
In each subsequent round, you will add extra stitches at the two short ends of the oval to keep the work lying flat. As a general rule, you need to add about six to eight extra stitches spread evenly across each round. If your rug starts to curl up at the edges, you are not adding enough increases. If it starts to ruffle and wave, you are adding too many. Adjust as you go — this is not an exact science, and different fabric strips behave differently.
Continue working in rounds, joining each round with a slip stitch or simply working in a continuous spiral if you prefer. Keep going until your rug reaches the size you want. For a kitchen rug, somewhere between 20 by 30 inches and 24 by 36 inches is usually ideal — big enough to be useful but not so big that it takes over the floor.
To finish, cut your fabric strip, leaving about a six-inch tail. Pull the tail through the last loop and use a yarn needle to weave it in securely on the back of the rug. Weave in any other ends and trim them close.
Color Planning and Design Ideas
One of the most fun parts of making a rag rug is deciding how it is going to look. If you are working with whatever fabric you have on hand, embrace the scrappy, collected look — mix and match freely and let the rug tell the story of your old clothes and linens. This kind of rug has an honest, lived-in beauty.
If you want something more intentional, sort your fabric strips into color families before you start and plan your rounds ahead of time. You might do rings of color — a cream center surrounded by navy, then a stripe of red, then navy again — for a classic nautical feel. Or you might alternate two colors in a spiral for a candy-stripe effect. You could also try ombre, gradually transitioning from one color to another across the rug.
For a kitchen, consider the colors already in the room. A rug that picks up the tones of your curtains, dish towels, or pottery creates a sense of intention and cohesion that makes the whole space feel more designed, even if it was made for free from old t-shirts.
Caring for Your Rag Rug
A kitchen rug needs to be washable, and the good news is that most cotton rag rugs wash extremely well. Shake out loose dirt or crumbs first, then toss the rug in the washing machine on a gentle or regular cycle with cold water. Avoid hot water, which can cause significant shrinkage, especially if your fabric strips include any percentage of pre-shrunk or blended fabric. A small amount of shrinkage is normal and actually helps the rug become denser and more resilient over time.
Dry your rug flat if you can, or on low heat in the dryer. High heat can damage the fabric and cause uneven shrinkage. Once dry, you will probably need to reshape the rug slightly by hand — just pull it gently into its intended shape and let it rest flat for a bit.
Over time, a well-used kitchen rug will soften beautifully. The fabric becomes more pliable, the colors mellow slightly, and the whole thing takes on a comfortable, broken-in character that a new rug simply cannot replicate.
A Few Tips to Make Your Rug Last Longer
Using a non-slip pad underneath your rug is the single most important thing you can do to protect both the rug and yourself. It prevents the rug from sliding on smooth floors, reduces wear on the underside of the rug from friction, and dramatically reduces the chance of a dangerous slip.
Try to keep the rug out of areas with constant direct moisture — right in front of the kitchen sink is fine, but directly under a dripping tap or on a perpetually wet surface is too much. Rotate the rug occasionally so that the same areas do not always take the heaviest foot traffic.
If a section of the rug starts to wear before the rest, do not panic. With a crocheted rug, you can often repair a worn section by carefully unpicking those rows and re-crocheting them with new fabric strips. This level of repairability is one of the things that makes handmade rugs genuinely more sustainable than their mass-produced counterparts — instead of throwing the whole thing away, you fix the part that needs attention.
The Bigger Picture: Why Making Things Matters
It would be easy to just buy a kitchen mat. They are available everywhere, they are cheap, and they come in whatever size and color you need. So why bother making one?
Partly it is about the object itself — a handmade rug is more durable in the right ways, more personal, more interesting underfoot. But there is also something that happens to a person when they make things. A kind of patience builds. A kind of attention. You start to notice fabric differently — in charity shops, in your own closet, in the worn elbows of a shirt you have been meaning to throw out. You start to see raw materials everywhere.
There is also the satisfaction, which is real and not trivial. Standing in your kitchen at the end of a long day and looking down at something you made from scraps — that is a particular kind of pleasure that no amount of online shopping can replicate. It connects you to a long chain of people who did exactly the same thing, who stood in their own kitchens in front of their own handmade rugs and felt, perhaps, some version of the same quiet contentment.
Making things is awesome. Not in a hashtag way, but in the actual original sense of the word — it inspires something close to awe, the realization that your hands can take raw materials and produce something real and useful and beautiful. A kitchen rag rug is a modest example of this, but it is a genuine one. Start cutting those strips. You will not regret it.
