The Diagonally Woven Rag-Rug

A diagonally woven T-shirt rag rug. I came up with that idea one evening and decided to see if it would work. Well, it did!

. . .but not without a few hiccups. I came up with the idea and started putting the T-shirt loops on my loom. Approximately 20 loops later my loom was misshapen. Oops? About a quarter of the way through weaving the rug, my loom broke. Yeah, oops. Apparently my loom wasn't built for diagonally woven rugs. 

My dad fixed the loom and I got back to weaving, and really hoping the rug would turn out well (and fearing it wouldn't). A couple weeks later (yes, this one took forever compared to my previous rugs), it was done! 

I'm happy to report that I really, really like it! It was worth making! 

One thing about this rug that surprised me, once I got it off of the loom, was the size. It's several inches bigger on each side than other, standard-ly woven, rugs I made on this loom! Now why is that? Well, the diagonally woven rug has twice as many loops in it as the as the standard rug does. It has 80 loops running diagonally one way, and 80 running diagonally the other way. The standard rugs have 40 running up and down and 40 running left to right. Thus this diagonal rug is very tightly woven, so it didn't shrink down as much as the others when I took it off the loom. No wonder this rug took me so long to make!

As I was making this rug I didn't pay much attention to what color loops I was using. I was more concerned with having enough loops of the correct sizes, than of a specific color. Thus, I was very pleased once the rug was off the loom to see that the color combination didn't look horrible! 

For my next diagonally woven rug (which is already on the loom) I've figured out another way to make the loops. Color coordinated diagonal rug, here I come! I've also thought through how to make this next rug with only 80 total loops rather than 160, so I'm really looking forward to seeing how it turns out!

Now, ignoring the colors, Which rug style do you like best? The standard rug or the diagonally woven rug? Let me know in the comments!