Locker Hook Rug (In progress)

I recently purchased a house that is HUGE... well huge by my standards considering the last ten years were spent in spaces 1000 square feet or smaller. This house, although it is a major fixer, has a lot of floor space (close to 2000 square feet) and I figured in my time not working on the house, I would make a rug to cover a portion of this floor space. 

I had previously purchased a rug canvas with the intent of doing a latch hook, old tee-shirt type rug, but found that to be WAYYYYY too time consuming for me and put the canvas in storage for a while... While perusing things to do on the internet, I came across the ladder hook method for creating a rug. I thought that it look like an interesting thing to do and when I decide I want to do something, there is no going back (hence the reason I am hell bent on finishing a full Ironman one of these days).

The following video from Youtube got me started on this whole rug thing:

The rug canvas that I purchased is similar to the one that you can find here: Rug Canvas . 

I already had the canvas so I went to the store in search for remnant pieces and a locker hook tool.  First stop - hate to admit it - was Walmart. Here I was able to to find nice remnant pieces, but had no luck finding a locker hook tool.  The Big Island of Hawaii has so many craft stores that I found myself next at Ace Hardware (note the sarcasm). Surprisingly, this Ace Hardware (and Crafts) is the largest craft store that we have on the Kona side of Hawaii. I thought, FOR SURE these guys would have the locker hook tool. Seems simple enough. NOPE. Since I was so gung-ho on working on this project, I had to improvise. I purchased a plastic crochet hook and a plastic yarn needle or whatever those are called and came up with the following:

This was made by drilling a hole in the bottom of the plastic crochet hook, cutting the plastic yarn needle in half, inserting into the hole, and taping closed with packing tape.  Now before you start judging me, you must know, 1) this thing gets the job done and 2) I didn't have the patience to wait for the "real" thing to arrive. By the way, all the needed supplies are shown in this photo: locker hook tool, rug canvas, remnants, and yarn. If you want to purchase the "real" tool, it can be found here: Locker Hooking Tool.  The remnants need to be cut, or torn, into one-inch thick strips, but I found that depending on the material weight, this width may need to be increased or decreased (i.e., thicker weighted material should be made into thinner strips and thinner material should be thicker). The yard is used to keep the material strips from slipping through the rug canvas holes. My rug started out like this: 

Not too much to look at, but it is definitely a work in progress. I didn't know how i wanted to finish the edges, so I left approximately an inch and a half of canvas around all the edges.  The current product looks like this: 

After about six rows the long way, I decided to switch directions and make for a more interesting finished product (hopefully). I will add to this post once I have added more.