Crocheted Dog Bowl Rug

Being in our brand new place, my husband requested that we have Mojo’s dog dishes sit on a mat in the kitchen.  I was fine with that request, because that meant that I got to crochet a new mat for him!

I ordered some Zpagetti Yarn from Lion Brand Yarns.  I had originally ordered one solid colored & one multi colored, but I got an email that apparently this stuff is super popular & they were out of the prints.  So I requested that they just send me two solid colored ones instead.  The thing with ordering this yarn is that you can’t choose your colors.  I’m sure they must sell it in some stores, but I hadn’t seen it around, so I ordered it since I didn’t really care what colors I got for this project.  It’s made using scraps from garment manufacturing.  Cool huh?

So anyway, I got my yarn & received black & yellow.  I started crocheting this by starting with a chain, then single crocheting around that chain on either side, and continued with rounds of single crochet until I ran out of the black yarn.  I did all of my increases on the corners, but I didn’t really keep track of numbers of stitches, I just kind of figured it out as I went.  Then I switched to yellow & did three rounds with that.  I used all of the black yarn & probably a little more than half of the yellow.

I think this was a pretty good project for my first time trying out the Zpagetti.  I was able to play around with it & see how it formed & worked best.  It was a good size too.  Each ream of this yarn doesn’t really contain that much, as you can see.  So it’s best for smaller scale projects.  If you’re wanting to crochet a large t-shirt yarn rug, you’ll probably want to just head to the Goodwill & pick up a bunch of XXL t-shirts & cut your own yarn.  I’d love to try this sometime too!

Have you used Zpagetti yarn or your own t-shirt yarn before?  What did you make?  (Link it in the comments if you have a blog or flicker pics!)  I’ve seen little bowls before, and rugs like mine, but any other fun ideas out there?