Sewing Rags

My aunt Mary had a loom. I suppose she made other things, but I remember the rugs that she made on this loom. I was interesting how she would feed the varied supplies and shift levers and tamp things into place as she created these rugs.
Aunt Mary was related to me because my grandmother and Mary were sisters. And another way she is related is that her husband is a son of my grandfather's brother. In other words, two Dearholt sisters married Hess'. One Hess was the nephew of the other.
Back to Mary's rugs. Mary would make the rugs using homemade yarn. When someone wanted a rug made, Mary would make the rugs and keep half for herself and half would go to the person that made the yarn.
My mom taught me to sew the yarn. I loved doing this. We would use old clothes. First, you would cut away all the hems around the outside of the big pieces of cloth. Then you would figure out which way the remaining cloth would make the best strips and cut nicks into the edge about one inch apart. Next, you would tear at each of the nicks and the cloth would make these strips one inch wide.
The sewing came next. You needed to sew the ends together to make a continuous one inch strip. You would place one end over the other and fold a third of the overlap from each side to make three double layers. Next you sew onto the beginning of the overlap and sew to the end of the overlap, reverse to the beginning and then sew forward to the end again. When you got to the end, you would stop sewing just as you were about to go off the edge. This allowed you to sew from one joint to the next without raising the presser foot.
It was fun to keep going with more and more yarn pushed off the back of the sewing machine onto the floor. Some times the pile would get all the way up to the level of the sewing table.
After sewing the ends together, we had to tug at each place the sewing machine ran off the one seam onto the next to break the string. We would roll the end product into a big ball of yarn.
A few years ago, my mom pulled one of these old worn rugs from a drawer and presented it to me. She explained that it was the last one known to exist. She felt I was the person that deserved to keep it since I had sewed more rags into yarn than anyone else. It is one of my prized possessions. The last I know, my cousin Dorla ended up with aunt Mary's loom.