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Friday, March 27, 2009

Am I going too far?

You know, I may just be going off the deep end with this crocheting of household items.

You see, after moving the coffee table to vacuum under it today, I was dismayed to see the deep, sharp-edged holes the legs were leaving in our brand new carpet. Not good.

Now, I know you can get special pads or discs that can be put under the legs of things to protect flooring, and I have looked at them. I've yet to see one that wasn't round. Also, they would never stay in place under and item on a carpet that might need to be moved.

My solution?


I made little square booties for the legs of our coffee table.

Is that too much? *L*

I started off by making a square the same size of the leg base using cotton yarn. The same stuff I've been using for my placemats - I've got one more to do, but decided to not take a change of running out of yarn and am waiting to buy another ball. Meanwhile, I'd been using the remains to make can coolies.

Using a 3.5mm hook, the size I needed was 5 x 5 in sc. Then I went around the edge in sc (5 on each side), with 1 ch in each corner to turn.

To build up the sides, I did a row of sc. To get 5 stitches on each side, I did 4sc, then 2sc together at the corner chain and the 1st sc of the next side, so there wouldn't be any gap.

This was the right size for the base, but when I built it up, I found 5 sc each side was too loose. I ripped it down to the first row, then reduced the second row to 4 stitches each side by doing 2sc together at each corner. After that, I just built it up for another 4 rows of sc, for a total of 6 rows.

The result is snug enough that, should we need to move the coffee table around, the little booties won't slip off. We're still going to get dents in the carpet, but they won't be as sharp and damaging.

I'm now thinking of making larger versions of these, except with several layers on the bottom for extra padding, to put on the legs of our desk. It has square legs too, and is making much deeper holes in the carpet. Nothing I've seen in the stores would fit properly under it.

So what do you think? Have I gone to far? LOL