Perhaps it looked amateurish and lacked finesse, and the hand-sewing certainly wasn't anything to write home about, but it was meant to be fashioned by an ordinary person, put together from valueless scraps of cotton rag attached to a hessian base. I think that what I made was absolutely faithful to that basic notion. In fact I was proud of making the effort (so untypical of me), and very pleased with the result.
Here I am, holding it up in Cotswold car park, so that friend Angie could take a picture:
The design is intended to be a blue sea creaming whitely onto a shore of yellow and orange sand, with a grassy green headland in the background, all basking in the light of that round yellow sun, hanging in a clear blue sky, with just that white wisp of cloud. I know the execution looks primitive and naïf, but so what? It's genuinely personal and hand-made - unique - and it deserved the special logo I sewed onto the back of the rug:
'Rag Rug No 1'. I envisaged making a series of these rag rugs in different colours and designs. And possibly I would hang them up on my walls, rather than use them as actual rugs.
But none of that happened. I never got around to making any more, and not even this first one got hung on a wall. The space was filled with other things. This rug turned out to be a one-off. It soon went into a bag, neatly folded up; and then put away in the top section of a wardrobe.
Fast forward to November 2019. I've just spattered blood over the existing shop-bought bathroom rug, which had looked like this:
That rug came with the house, when I inherited everything on Mum and Dad's deaths in 2009. I'm guessing that by 2019 it might have been at least fifteen years old. Well, I'd now ruined it. Not so much with dripped blood. It was an old rug with a rubberised backing that had started to perish. It just disintegrated - crumbling into bits - when I attempted to wash the thing.
I didn't want to be without a rug in the bathroom, so, remembering my rag rug, I unwrapped it and placed it on the bathroom floor.
It'll do! It was looking fine in the electric light. By daylight it looked even better.
Now you can't say that's drab. I think it looks very cheerful. And it's nice to stand on with bare feet. Mind you, I cover it with a bath mat when washing or showering, just as I did with the previous mat that I've had to bin.
The next task is to buy some fresh padded vinyl (do they still sell that?), cut it to the right shape, and replace what is presently down on the bathroom floor - which I assure you, was there when Mum and Dad moved in, back in 2000. It'll do for the toilet next door, too. In a colour that matches my rag rug, naturally!
I'm glad that, finally, my 2016 creation is getting some real use. And I must have saved myself some money, by not having to pay out for a new rug bought from a shop.
