| Toothbrush Rag Rugs Welcome to our webpage on Toothbrush Rag Rugs. This method of rag rug making is closely associated with naalbinding. It is one of the lesser-known methods of making rugs from rags or strips of cloth. Once you become addicted to rag rug making, you will find yourself ripping up perfectly good sheets! Some of us in the group were fortunate enough to take a class on this type of rug making from a wonderful woman who learned this craft from her grandmother, who in turn, learned it from hers. Ann and Sandra are the tool-makers of our group. Each of them made, or had her husband's help in making needles for this project. Sandra actually made us all needles out of an antler. We are all indebted to her! And to Ann. She is the one who drew our attention to this class. "They are very time consuming because antler is hard and it needs to go through several stages: cutting the antler, shaping the needles, thinning the needle for the right thickness, dry sanding by hand with a coarse sandpaper, sanding with finer sandpaper down the fineness of 1600 gauge which feels like velvet, and after all of that, I wet polish it with that 100. The holes comes last and it appeared to me that they needed to be elongated. I have made myself a few different ones with different hole sizes to accommodate different fibers and weights of material." By Sandra "Joan and I found at Wal Mart (not my favorite store you know 8-{ ) across from the expensive toothbrushes, some inexpensive ones packed two to a package, called Dr Du-Mor. They were 97¢ for the two of them. Anyway I asked dh to cut them down for me and sharpen them. He used my one from Gerry Webber's class on toothbrush rugs as a pattern. He said he "cut the heads off with a hacksaw and then sharpened them with an electric grinder". The holes he simply drilled out a bit to make them bigger. Then he smoothed them down a bit with some sandpaper. The man at the class sharpened them with a knife and then used a rasp to sand them down. Get the cheapy brushes. No contoured handles with vinyl finger grips. You want a plain, flat, straight handle with a hole on the end." By Ann |
 | |  | |  |