Knit-Weaving and Rag Rug Knitting Machine Experiments | Stripes

There is something quietly addictive about feeding strips of old fabric into a knitting machine and watching them emerge on the other side as something entirely new. Knit-weaving and rag rug making on a knitting machine sits at a fascinating crossroads between thrift, tradition, and genuine textile innovation — and once you start experimenting with stripes, it becomes very hard to stop. Whether you are working on a bulky-gauge domestic machine, a punchcard model, or something vintage you picked up at an estate sale, the principles here will give you a solid foundation and plenty of creative directions to explore.

This post is a deep dive into what knit-weaving actually is, how it relates to traditional rag rug making, what happens when you start using a knitting machine for both, and — most importantly — what goes right and wrong when stripes enter the picture.

What Is Knit-Weaving, and How Does It Differ from Regular Knitting?

Knit-weaving is sometimes called inlay knitting or float weaving, and the terminology shifts depending on which machine tradition or which country you learned from. The basic idea is that a background yarn knits in the usual way — creating a proper knitted structure with intermeshing loops — while a second yarn, often called the weaving yarn or the laid-in yarn, is caught by alternate needles but does not form loops of its own. Instead, it sits on the back of the fabric in long floats or is trapped under selected stitches, giving you a woven-looking surface without the structure actually being woven at all.

The result is a fabric that has the stretch and drape of knitting on one side, and a more rigid, woven-looking texture on the other side. For rag rugs, this is an incredibly useful property. Traditional woven rag rugs are firm and flat because the weft goes over and under warp threads in a proper loom structure. Knit-woven rag rugs are a little more flexible, which actually makes them better suited to certain uses — they have a bit of give underfoot, they are less likely to curl at the edges (a perennial problem with purely knitted rugs), and they can be made much more quickly than hand-woven alternatives.

If you have ever knitted a piece of intarsia or fair isle colorwork and thought “this is interesting but I wish I could use thicker materials,” knit-weaving is essentially the answer to that thought. You maintain a lightweight background yarn on the feeders, and you feed your heavier, chunkier, or more unusual weaving material through by hand or with a yarn feeder, catching it in place as the carriage passes.

The Rag Rug Tradition and Why Machines Make Sense

Rag rugs have been made for centuries across many cultures, driven by the simple need to use up fabric scraps and worn-out clothing rather than throw them away. In Scandinavian countries, the rya and the trasmatta traditions produced some of the most beautiful rag rugs in the world. In North America, braided and hooked rag rugs were domestic staples. In the UK, proddy rugs made from fabric strips pushed through hessian backing were a working-class craft tradition that survived well into the twentieth century.

What all of these traditions share is a commitment to material transformation — the idea that something old and exhausted can become something new and useful. A set of worn denim jeans becomes the weft of a new floor covering. A pile of old cotton bedsheets becomes the foundation of a rug that will last another twenty years. This is circular making before the phrase “circular economy” existed.

The machine knitting angle enters this story in the mid-twentieth century, when domestic knitting machines became more widely available and crafters began experimenting with what they could do beyond standard garment knitting. People discovered fairly quickly that feeding strips of fabric through the machine as a weaving yarn — rather than using conventional yarn — produced interesting results. The machines were not originally designed for this, which is precisely what makes it experimental territory. You have to adapt, problem-solve, and accept that some of your early attempts will be learning exercises rather than finished objects.

Setting Up Your Knitting Machine for Rag Rug Experiments

Before you start cutting up fabric, it is worth thinking carefully about your machine and what it can realistically handle.

Most standard-gauge machines (with needle pitch around 4.5mm) are too fine for serious rag rug work. The needle beds are designed for relatively thin yarn, and forcing thick fabric strips through will bend or break needles and cause dropped stitches. If you want to do rag rug work on a standard-gauge machine, you need to be very conservative with your strip width — think 5 to 8mm strips of thin, loosely woven cotton — and you need to use a fine background yarn and a relatively loose tension setting.

Bulky-gauge machines, with needle pitches of around 9mm, are much better suited to this kind of work. If you have access to a Bond Ultimate Sweater Machine, a Passap Duomatic with the bulky attachment, or a vintage Brother Bulky, you are starting from a much better position. These machines can handle strips up to about 15mm wide, depending on the fabric type, without straining the mechanism.

Mid-gauge machines (around 6.5mm pitch) occupy a middle ground that many people find surprisingly versatile. You can feed slightly thicker strips than a standard gauge machine while still maintaining enough structure to create a useable fabric.

Regardless of your machine gauge, the setup for knit-weaving follows similar principles. You need to identify which needles will catch the weaving yarn and which will knit only the background yarn. On many machines, you can select alternate needles to hold position (often called the weaving position or the E position), which means the carriage passes over them without pulling them fully through, but the weaving yarn gets trapped under the latches. This is the fundamental mechanical action that makes knit-weaving possible.

Some machines have dedicated weaving brushes or weaving yarn guides that help hold the weaving material in place as the carriage passes. If your machine has these, use them — they make the process significantly more consistent. If it does not, you can improvise by holding the weaving yarn taut with your non-carriage hand as you pass the carriage, letting go just before the carriage reaches the far needle, then repositioning for the return pass.

Preparing Your Fabric Strips

The quality of your finished rag rug depends enormously on how well you prepare your fabric strips. This is the part of the process that most beginners underestimate, partly because it feels like a preliminary step rather than a real craft skill, and partly because it is genuinely tedious. But do it well, and everything downstream becomes easier.

Fabric type matters a great deal. Loosely woven cotton — old sheeting, worn shirting, lightweight denim — is the most forgiving. It tears easily into strips, it does not fray excessively, and it feeds through the machine without too much resistance. Knitted fabrics, cut into strips, behave very differently: they curl on themselves, creating a tubular strip that is actually quite pleasant to work with in terms of texture but requires wider cuts to compensate for the curl. Old jersey t-shirts are particularly good for this — cut into strips roughly 15 to 20mm wide and they will curl into a nice, rounded strand that feeds beautifully.

Woven fabrics with a tight weave — upholstery fabric, canvas, heavy denim — are difficult on most domestic machines and are better reserved for hand-weaving or loom work. They create too much resistance and are likely to damage the needle bed over time.

For cutting strips, you have several options. Tearing is fastest and produces a frayed edge that is actually aesthetically pleasing in finished work, but it only works along the grain of woven fabric and cannot be done on knitted fabric. Rotary cutters with a self-healing mat are accurate and quick once you have a rhythm going. Specialist fabric slitters designed for rag rug work are also available and can be a worthwhile investment if you plan to do this regularly.

Strip width should be consistent along each length of fabric, but does not need to be identical across different fabrics — variation in strip width contributes to the textural interest of the finished piece, as long as you account for it in your feeding technique.

Joining strips is an art in itself. For a rag rug, you generally do not want knots sitting inside the fabric structure — they create lumps and put uneven stress on the surrounding stitches. The diagonal join is the most reliable technique: cut the end of each strip at a 45-degree angle, cut the next strip’s beginning at the same angle, overlap them, and stitch or glue along the diagonal. Once the join is pulled tight into the fabric, it almost disappears.

The Stripe Element: Why Stripes Are the Natural Starting Point

When you begin experimenting with knit-weaving on a knitting machine, stripes are almost inevitably where you end up first, and for good reason. Changing color in a row-by-row sequence is one of the simplest ways to introduce visual variety without having to manage complex needle selection or multiple feeders simultaneously. You simply feed one color of fabric strip for several rows, then switch to another color, and a stripe appears. It is clean, graphic, and immediately satisfying.

But stripes in rag rug knit-weaving have layers of complexity that reveal themselves as you work. The first thing you notice is that the stripe edges are not perfectly crisp in the way that a printed stripe would be. Because the weaving yarn sits inside a knitted structure rather than lying flat in a woven structure, the top and bottom edges of each stripe band have a slightly integrated quality — the knitted background yarn bridges the transition, creating a subtle blending at the join. This is not a flaw; once you accept it as a characteristic of the technique, you can start designing to use it, choosing colors that bleed beautifully into each other rather than colors that need hard, graphic separation.

The second discovery is that stripe width is relative. On a loom, if you pass the weft across three times, you get three weft rows of equal height. On a knitting machine, the height of each stripe band is determined by the number of passes and by the nature of the knitted background structure, which has its own row height determined by the yarn weight and tension setting. This means you are essentially working with two grids simultaneously — the knit grid and the weave grid — and they interact to produce the final stripe proportions. Learning to anticipate and control this interaction is one of the more intellectually engaging aspects of the craft.

Horizontal stripes are the straightforward starting point. But once you have horizontal stripes under control, you can start thinking about other stripe orientations. Diagonal stripes require needle selection patterns that shift incrementally across rows — achievable on punchcard or electronic machines, trickier on fully manual setups. Vertical stripes within a knit-weaving context are a different beast entirely, essentially requiring you to manage multiple weaving yarns across different needle sections simultaneously, which approaches the complexity of intarsia weaving.

Experiments with Color and Material

The real joy of machine knit-weaving for rag rugs is what happens when you start throwing unexpected materials into the mix. Fabric strips are the traditional medium, but they are not the only option.

Thick wool roving, loosely twisted rather than spun, feeds through beautifully as a weaving yarn on a bulky machine and creates a lofted, tactile surface that is completely different in character from fabric strips. Combine narrow bands of roving with wider bands of cotton sheeting and you get a stripe composition that plays with texture as much as color.

Rope, twine, and cord can all be incorporated as weaving elements, though they require careful attention to tension. Natural jute twine has a beautiful earthy quality and is wonderfully durable. Cotton macrame cord in 3mm to 5mm widths feeds very reliably and produces a firm, almost sculptural stripe.

Plastic carrier bags, cut into loops or strips, are another direction worth exploring — especially for outdoor rug applications where you need a waterproof, easy-clean surface. They have a slippery quality that requires some adaptation of technique, but the finished results can be striking, and the ecological case for using up plastic waste in this way is compelling.

Denim strips, mentioned earlier, deserve special attention. Old denim fades in ways that are visually extraordinary. A rug made from strips cut across multiple pairs of jeans will have a palette of indigo, stone, pale blue, and near-white that no dye job can quite replicate. The stripes in a denim rag rug tell a story — this was a pair of jeans worn to work, this was a child’s pair worn at the knees first, this was the back pocket panel. There is a documentary quality to materials-led making that is quite moving if you think about it long enough.

Common Problems and How to Address Them

Dropped stitches are the most frequent issue in rag rug knit-weaving, and they almost always come down to tension. The weaving yarn, being much thicker and stiffer than the background knitting yarn, creates resistance as the carriage passes. If the background yarn is not given enough slack to accommodate this, stitches pull off the needles. The solution is usually to loosen your tension setting by one or two numbers beyond where you would normally work with the background yarn alone, and to make sure your weaving yarn is held at a consistent height and tension as you feed it across.

Curling edges are the second most common problem. Pure knitting always wants to curl because of the asymmetrical structure of the knit stitch. Knit-weaving reduces this tendency significantly because the laid-in weaving yarn adds stability, but it rarely eliminates it entirely. You can reduce curling further by working a few rows of weave-only at the beginning and end of the piece, or by picking up and working a border in a stitch pattern — moss stitch or seed stitch works particularly well — that naturally lies flat.

Uneven stripe widths happen when your strip cutting is inconsistent. A strip that is 12mm wide at one end and 18mm at the other will not feed evenly, and the stripe will appear thicker in some sections. The more care you take at the cutting stage, the more even your stripes will be. Using a rotary cutter with a guide strip taped to your cutting mat as a width gauge is a worthwhile investment of five minutes of setup time.

Machine damage is a real concern if you push materials through that are too thick or too stiff. Go slowly, listen to your machine, and if the carriage is sticking or the needles are bending, stop and reassess your materials rather than forcing through. A bent needle on a domestic knitting machine is an irritating setback; a broken needle bed is a much more serious problem.

Finishing Your Rag Rug

Once you have knitted off your rug piece, the finishing work begins. Cast off firmly to prevent the last row from unraveling, using a method that gives you a stable, compact edge — a latch-tool cast off worked slightly tighter than your knitting tension is usually best.

Secure all the ends of your background yarn by threading them back through the knitted structure on the reverse side, using a blunt tapestry needle. The ends of your fabric strips can be dealt with in a number of ways depending on the aesthetic you want. Trimming them close and allowing them to fray slightly gives a pleasantly rustic finish. Tucking them back through the knitted loops with a crochet hook gives a cleaner look. Knotting them deliberately and leaving them as a feature on the reverse side turns the back of the rug into its own design element.

For floor use, adding a non-slip backing is highly recommended. Thin rubber grip matting, available from haberdashery and craft suppliers, can be cut to size and either pinned, glued, or stitched onto the reverse of the rug. Alternatively, a liquid latex no-slip treatment, applied with a brush to the back of the fabric and allowed to dry, provides grip without adding significant bulk.

Washing knit-woven rag rugs depends entirely on what materials you used. All-cotton pieces can usually go through a cool machine wash. Mixed-fiber pieces, especially those incorporating wool roving or denim, should be washed with more caution — cool water, gentle cycle, and air drying laid flat to prevent distortion of the knitted structure.

Moving Forward with Your Experiments

The beauty of framing this kind of work as experiments is that it removes the pressure of perfection. Your first knit-woven rag rug is almost certainly going to teach you more than it produces a flawless finished object, and that is exactly right. Keep notes as you work — tension settings, strip widths, number of rows per stripe, materials used — and photograph your work at each stage. Over time, these records become an invaluable personal reference that no pattern book can replicate, because they document your specific machine, your specific materials, and the particular way your hands work.

The stripe element invites ongoing experimentation in ways that are endlessly renewable. Try alternating wide and narrow stripes. Try using the same color in two different materials — a stripe of red cotton jersey, then a stripe of red woven cotton shirting — and see how material texture alone creates visual distinction even within a monochrome palette. Try gradients, where each stripe is a slightly shifted value or hue of the one before it, building