Every job I’ve ever had gave out t-shirts. Some jobs I had to purchase a t-shirt* to wear while at work but then also gave me shirts to wear. Currently I make shirts with kids and also make shirts for the org as a project with kids. I have dozens and dozens of shirts that I’ve gathered over the years. It used to be that they would go from regular wearing to yard work or sleep wear. But currently many of the shirts from the last 10 years don’t fit anymore. They are comically large, and I only need so many to sleep in.

I have made many different projects out of t-shirt material over the years. One of my favorites is the t-shirt tote bag. Cut the sleeves off leaving the stitched seam behind, cut a large U shape at the neck leaving about 3 inches on the shoulder. Stitch up the bottom. Easy. We use these for laundry bags but with a double stitch across the bottom they can be used for shopping bags.  For laundry bags I used my largest old t-shirts. XXL. They can carry a lot of stuff.

I am not good at knitting or crochet. I lose count of where I’m at in the project and generally drop stitches and get distracted. Even with that I’m fascinated by t-shirt yarn. It’s probably the second fasted way to recycle an old t-shirt and you end up with a lot of yarn. Making t-shirt yarn is pretty easy but also it is important that you keep the width of the strips cut the same. I’ll explain why later.

For this project I had no idea how many shirts I needed, I started with 8. These shirts are a range of really well worn to newer. If your shirts are really well worn you’ll need to cut the shirts wider to get yard that is roughly the same thickness as a newer less thin shirt. The weight of the fabric does come into play here. New shirts that are still thick make thickener yarn. Thinner shirts make much thinner yarn and can tear while in the roll and stretching part of making the yarn. I should have taken some photos of the shirts cut into the yarn and the different thicknesses. Also, get rid of the seams, I left a lot of mine in and it makes the yarn harder to use.

I attempted to keep my strips around 1.5inches (3cm ish) to 2 inches. There were some areas where I didn’t do a great job of this. This causes problems later in the process.

I want to again say this- I am a terrible knitter.

I won’t give instructions on how to use the knitting loom but instead direct you to this video. It helped me get started.

I bought THIS loom. My resulting piece is a bit too marrow BUT I think part of the problem is that because I’m a terrible knitter I used too much tension and kept my loops too tight with yarn that was a bit too thin for the project. You can get looms at a more narrow gauge that work for thinner yarns. I might try to build my own in the future but for now this worked pretty well. For a blanket and my lack of skill this was maybe a bit too narrow. And to be clear I was making a lap blanket for use on the couch for TV watching.

Anyway, I let the bands of color be mostly random. I also recognized that I had a lot of old gray t-shirts. This worked well for having a unifying color in the blanket.

Here you can see the back of the blanket.

In the above pic you can see the attachment point for one color to the next. Because I attached as I went I had to cut the slots a little wider and this resulted in a lot of little flaps. In the future I would consider creating one giant ball of t-shirt yarn and attaching each shirt together in the yarn making process. This results in nearly invisible attachments and looks a lot better. IMO. I might trim some of these larger flaps down but I’m afraid that might cause the blanket to unravel. 

This pic shows a VERY well worn shirt- the red yarn sandwiched between 2 newer shirts. The well worn shirt produced a very thin, but sturdy yarn that is exceptionally soft. I had cut the strips to about the same size as the shirts that were in good condition and the resulting yarn was so much thinner and less bulkier it threw the knitting off.

I think you can see in my pics that my tension on the yarn was not great. there is a great deal of variation in tension. Some of this is because i’m a terrible knitter and some is a result of the variety of thickness of my yarns. I did not strive for a single thickness of my yarn, I let it vary a lot. The end result is that it was a lot harder to work with.

Anyway the end result is a heavy thick blanket with a lot of wonkiness. I’ll be making more yarn from more old t-shirts and making at least one more of these and possibly a scarf as well. The goal here, is to reuse my old shirts and create something new from them. I’ve made many swiffer pads and absorbent rag pads and even with that I have dozens of old knit shirts that need to be recycled and reused.