Recycling T-Shirts- edited 15/07/14

T-shirt yarn handbag, almost finished.

I've always tried to recycle as much as I can. About three years ago t-shirt yarn and other related projects cached my eye immediately.

I plunged into the web and began to search frantically for howto's and ideas. 

Commercial bobins are ok (the ones that I'm currently using for crocheting the bag you can see in the pic, haha!) but I was trying to show Mrs. Soft Kitty and Little Romulan what can be done with the old clothes, especially with the old t-shirts:
yes, the ones that have zillions of permanent stains, small holes, mummy I've weared this a couple of times but I don't like it anymore (mummyweneedtogoshoppingnow!), my favorite old tee that is almost disintegrating but I wouldn't dare to throw away. 

Making t-shirt yarn is fairly easy and with a little bit of patience, once you have several balls or stripes of t-shirts, you are ready for the wonderful recycling projects that are awaiting for you. Two things to bear in mind when you make t-shirt yarn: by cutting t-shirts that don't have side seams you will have a continuous seamless strand ball (but if not it's perfectly ok) and if you're going to make more than one ball in one row, you can end up with scissoritis syndrome, that is, your thumb can go numb for several days due to the effort of cutting through several layers of fabric. If you use a rotary cutter and a cutting base you can save time, avoid the scissoritis syndrome and get perfect stripes.

Last year I gave several t-shirt recycling workshops to the students of Mrs. Soft Kitty and Little Romulan classes. We had a wonderful time, specially when we were cutting the t-shirts (I was the first one to go mad cutting and cutting and cutting, hahaha!). We made tons of different things: key holders, scarves, necklaces, baskets, bracelets, etc. As for the crocheted items it was a challenge to teach basic crochet to 25 children armed with giant hooks (meow!), some of them like it , some didn't but I'll be satisfied if at least one got trapped in the crocheting world. The "sad" part for me is that we used almost all of my precious balls (the mini-balls that you see in the picture are the remainders of my stash).

What was left after the t-shirt recycling workshop at school.

Anyway you can also make yarn out of almost any type of fabric: worn-out bed sheets, jeans, blouses, etc, and of course recycle anything made with yarn (sweaters, scarves...).

And if the piece of fabric is too small to make yarn or stripes out of it you can keep it for making flowers, pom-poms and small embellishment or deco items.
This way you will end up like me and your house will look like a junk shop.

Here you have some links to how to make t-shirt yarn and some inspiring projects (just in case you'd like to give it a try). No pics here, only links (you know, these days people are extremely sensitive with the copyright issue even for educational purposes).

Note: I will edit this post periodically to add more links to interesting projects or tutorials.

• The tutorial for making t-shirt yarn, here.
• To make a rug using a hula-hoop, here.
• To make awesome scarves or get inspiration, here, here and here.
• Flowers and deco, here and here.
• Placemats, here.
• Baskets, here and here.
• Hangers, shorts
• With bed sheets.
• Using plarn (that is, yarn made out of shopping plastic bags): here. To know how to make plarn, here.
• With jeans. Or here. To make yarn out of jeans follow the same instructions as for the t-shirt yarn but firstly have a look at this link.

Note: if you find a link that's not working, please tell me which one and I will susbtitute it for another similar link.

There are loads and loads of wonderful projects out there popping directly into your eyes, which one would you choose for a start?