The Boring Part ...

David wears a lot of t-shirts, plain white ones under dress shirts for work and colored ones for weekends, and since t-shirts are also one of the more popular giveaways in theater and tech companies, he also manages to acquire six or eight new ones a year.  He also wears them out pretty quickly, and though they spend quite a lot of time in the "yard work/painting shirt" drawer, there is quite a lot of fabric in a "worn out" t-shirt that is still strong and fairly clean -- so that it seems a shame to just throw it out.

Although I've seen around the internet a good half-dozen tutorials, at least, on how to make t-shirt yarn, it has taken me rather a long time to decide to try it myself.  But since I've started crocheting recently, the idea has come up again, and because I not only have a stack of David's old t-shirts but just now a stack of old day-camp ones that the girls have grown out of, I thought, "well, now's my chance!"

I certainly have enough t-shirts to not need to be frugal about how to cut the shirt -- many tutorials use only the body, below where the sleeve attaches -- but since I just want to make a rag rug for inside the back door, I don't mind it looking like a rag rug, with some of the bits from the less-straight cuts sticking out.  But one of the big points for me is the re-using/recycling aspect, so I decided on the whole-shirt method from Sustain My Craft Habit -- which also has a helpful video to accompany the written instructions.  This one discards only the collar and a few bits off of the most awkward angles, so that there is only a handful of fabric that gets thrown away.

That said, cutting up a dozen t-shirts is really boring.  Really.  Especially since over half of them are black!  There are a lot of colored shirts in my stash, but since I've noticed that the black dye leaches out onto other colors with repeated washing, so that any back-door mat would become rather dingy after not many washes, I decided to use just black and grey for this one.  Cutting up that many t-shirts is also quite hard on the hands, and so when a rather fantastic 60%-off coupon arrived from Jo-Ann's in my mailbox, I decided to splurge on a rotary cutter and cutting mat set, which I'd been dreaming about for a while anyway.

It's still pretty boring cutting the shirts, but at least my hand doesn't ache afterwards!

So now all of the black and grey shirts have been cut and balled up, and it's time to get out the gigantic crochet hook --

Comments

[Mary Lou Egan]

I have a bag of t-shirts I've been saving for this very type of project. I look forward to seeing yours.

[David M Beach]

i gave all my old tshirts to my sister to make a quilt. I'll have to wait a bit to try this