Upcycled granny square coasters

These little granny square coasters are part of an attempt to try and make use of old unwanted items like some old duvet covers that I have gathering dust at the back of one of my cupboards.

Originally I had wanted to turn this blue and white striped double duvet cover into a lovely crocheted rag rug for which I've seen a few lovely project photos of in some of my craft books. This project seemed to be doomed to failure though as my original hope to make a circular mat wouldn't stay flat and then when I realised just how long it would take to cut up a whole double duvet cover and then try to crochet it was just too big a time commitment.

So while looking at the bag containing the failed rag rug I came up with the bright idea to try and make coasters instead. Crocheting with fabric gives you a lovely thick material which seems well suited to making hard wearing rugs and so I thought it would also make good chunky coasters. These are just very simple granny squares which after only the first two rows were finished. The downsides to working with fabric scraps though is that it is very hard on your hands as well as being very slow to crochet up, each of these coasters took me about an hour to complete!

To the right you can see the original attempt at a rag rug being used by my little boy... seeing as I had wanted to make it square and it was about a metre long I would have still been doing it this time next year if I had continued with it. Maybe next time I want to try and make a rag rug I'll have a go with the plaited method instead.