Recycling 101: Make Yarn from a T-Shirt

Here's a great idea for your unwanted t-shirts - turn them into yarn! And here's a cool tutorial on how to do it.......

Tools & Materials:
1. T-shirts (those without side-seam)
2. A pair of sharp scissors

Place the T-shirt flat on the floor or working table.


We only need the bottom-half portion of the T-shirt. Cut horizontally from sleeve to sleeve as shown above. Cut away the end border of the T-shirt too. This useful portion must be plain and free from printing, embroidery and any joints or seams. Any motifs will be too hard for the T-shirt to turn into tubular yarn.


Fold the T-shirt from side to side, leaving an inch allowance as shown.


Cut into strips as shown, remember not to cut the 1 inch allowance. Leave it there as we are going to use this to form a continuous strip. The width of the strip will determine the thickness of your yarn, but the minimum is 15mm, anything less than this, the process will fail. The width shown here is 15mm.


Finish cutting the T-shirt from top to bottom evenly.


Unfold the 1 inch allowance and it will look as shown below.


The next process is to make a slant cut from strip 1 to strip 2, strip 2 to strip 3 and so on in order to create a continuous strip for the whole T-shirt.


I purposely leave the first strip uncut until I have finished all. No catch, just my preference to show you better how the slanting looks like.


Now, I have a loooooooong strip of continuous T-shirt yarn waiting for the next process.


Next is to turn the strip into a tubular yarn. All you need to do is tug the strip as shown below. Rememeber I told you that the minimum width of the strip is 15mm? The secret is…. if you have anything narrower than this, it will break once you pull.


See, the strip will curl and form a tubular shape after the tug. This process will lengthen the yarn too, which is good, so you have more yarn to work on your project.
….tug….
….tug….
….tug….


The strip has now turned into tubular yarn, from Fettuccine to Spaghetti ***wink***. You can roll your yarn into ball and it is ready for your next project.  HAPPY YARNING!!! I have finished making the drawstring bag as shown above. Please click here to have a look and you can download the simple pattern I created.  


Tutorial via Craft Passion.