The yarn dilemma… I need rugs for my place, the bathroom is probably one of the first places to get one. Our concrete floors are awesome but dust travels all around our combo home/workshop. I remembered, from WAY back in my brain vault, that I saw people making yarn from tshirts. In my stash is a LARGE bag of tube jersey – there were no side seams, just yards and yards of tube.

I picked up the jersey ages ago at Michael Levine’s $2.50 a pound store (back when it was $1 a pound). I intended to make skirts and shirts from but never used it. Out of the bag it came to make yarn!

There are many, many places to get instructions on making the yarn itself so I’ll give my pitfalls and problems.

If you are doing this for the first time, try the cuts on a smaller tshirt before diving into cutting a yard wide piece of jersey. I didn’t quite have the loop cutting down on my first few rows and wasted some fabric. I found cutting much easier with a rotary tool than with scissors. The rotary tool gave me much cleaner cuts for consistent widths.

When you start trimming the loops to strips, leave the uncut sections folded so you can see where the cuts go for the next steps. I got confused as I was going up the “ribs” and ended with some short balls of yarn.

You end up with a big pile of fabric strips after all the cutting is done.

You can see what the yarn balls look like at the top of this post. I stretched the jersey as I rolled the yarn into a ball to make the edges roll up. I cut about a yard of my tube jersey at a time, which I thought would go pretty far. It didn’t work up quite as big as thought it would for the length. The first ball made up the granny square below, Playstion controller for size reference. I’m a nerd, you should know I have nerdy stuff for size reference :).

My couch makes a great model.

Here is a detail shot:

All in all, it is a quick project that chews threw a lot of jersey. If you have the patience to cut a million shirts, do it. I like the consistent color and uniformity of the long lengths of fabric. The bigger pieces require fewer joins of yarn. Having lots of pieces the tack together is a pain and I dislike weaving in the ends.

Have you made your own tshirt yarn? How did it go?