T-Shirt Yarn

Did you know...you can make a continuous strand of "yarn" from a t-shirt? And it's fairly simple to make! All you need is a pair of scissors a t-shirt, and a ruler (if you want to be precise with your measurements).

Before you start snipping away at your collection of t-shirts, first make sure that the shirt you want to use does not have a seam down the sides. You want to use shirts that are one continuous tube around the middle.

Lay your t-shirt down on a flat surface and cut just below the armpits, or just below the line of printing on the shirt, all the way across the shirt. You will get a tube that looks something like this:

Next, you want to start cutting the t-shirt tube into about 1 inch strips, stopping one inch from the end of the shirt. Don't worry if your lines aren't perfectly straight, it doesn't matter if there is a little wiggle when you cut. Once you complete this step it should look something similar to this:

Next step is to snip at the top  where you left the one inch margin. If you refer to the picture below, you can see that you cut diagonally across the top to separate the strips yet still keeping the whole thing intact and in one piece. It's hard for me to put into words, which is why I have a nifty picture. You need to cut where the red lines are.

I used MS Paint to create this masterpiece...if only I were actually capable of creating parallel lines.
But the picture gets the job done!

If everything has gone well, you should now have one continuous strip. The next step is to stretch out the material. Starting with one of the ends, stretch it out, about a foot or two at a time. The fabric will start to curl in on itself, like the picture below. 

As you can see, at this point I still had a bit of a way to go, so Gizmo decided to help.

Now all that is left is to form it into a ball so it doesn't become a tangled mess! I created several balls of t-shirt yarn from old t-shirts. Now I need to make something out of them. This project is super easy to complete, you are recycling materials, and freeing up space in your dresser.