Sundre resident Joyce Courtoreille enjoys crafting rugs out of plastic bags and old cloth materials in her spare time.
She has carried on the tradition from her grandmother and great- grandmother, who made rugs out of recycled items back in the day to get by.
“They would take old clothes and stuff like that and then just cut them into strips and then they would do cloth rugs out of them,” Courtoreille told the Round Up at her home in Sundre last week.
“So that way there was always something being used for something else – you never lost the purpose of what you had.”
The plastic rugs have a lifespan of roughly 20 years and the cloth rugs can last up to 50 years.
“A friend of mine got one from my grandmother and it has reached 50 years. The same rug she made out of just cloth has lasted for 50 years and is only now starting to fall apart,” she said.
She uses old jeans, T-shirts, socks, pantyhose, towels and other cloth materials to make the cloth rugs.
Her grandmother also used the rugs underneath mattresses for extra support, she said, adding it was her idea to create the plastic rugs.
“So she'd start getting stacks and stacks and stacks of these bags and she's like ‘I don't know what to do with these things, there has got to be a purpose for them somehow instead of throwing them out and filling up the landfill', so she came up with the recycling idea of making rugs out of them,” she said.
She uses plastic rugs in front of her washer and dryer and has had them there for about 10 years, and they are still in good condition. They can also be used outside.
She uses the cloth rugs inside and has had several of them in her home for more than 10 years, which are all still in good condition.
To clean the cloth rugs she throws them in the washing machine, and hoses the plastic ones down outside.
She uses baler twine on a weaving loom to make the rugs. She can make a plastic rug in one day, but a cloth one can take three to four days to complete.
Her grandmother taught her how to make them when she was six years old. She has been doing it ever since, and she is now 39.
“It's a unique thing. It's not something everybody sees every day,” she said. “It's just a hobby – it's like a craft. And it helps people. If I don't sell them I just donate them back, so like Value Village, thrift shops, stuff like that.”
She sells the plastic rugs for $15 and the cloth rugs for $25.
“I don't do it for an actual full income. For me it's just using what I have and just doing it for fun – for a hobby,” she said.
“I think if you can make something out of it, why throw it out? It's really neat to be able to see something come out of something that somebody would just throw out.”
She has lived in Sundre for five years with her husband and her two sons. Before Sundre she lived in Grande Prairie and taught rug-making classes there.
She is the only one in her family who has carried on the tradition, except her grandmother's sister who makes oval rugs by hand.
“It's keeping the legacy in a sense from the family and being able to give back to people out there that might need it,” she said. “Because you never know, there's always people that need something and can't necessarily afford the big rugs today either, if you're a single family or if it's your first time out on your own.”
She and her husband are roofers and they volunteer regularly for Sundre and Olds search and rescue teams.
Other hobbies of hers include beading, art, sewing, quilting, gardening and fishing.
