making t-shirt yarn

teal t-shirt yarn

In my wanderings on the interwebs a few weeks ago I found some t-shirt yarn on etsy.. .it looked lovely but it cost a small fortune, and as I'm not the best of knitters I put that idea on the back burner for another day in the distant future when my blogging has made me a fortune.....in other words never.

A few days ago I remembered about the t-shirt yarn and googled to see if there were any tutorials and found two great tutorials on Polka Dot Pineapple and Craft Passion (visit both sites because they are brilliant tutorials) to make t-shirt yarn. The t-shirt yarn tutorials used t-shirts with no side seams, I have plenty of old t-shirts I thought it would be a great idea...but on further investigation found that every single old t-shirt we have has side seams.

red and white t-shirt yarn

So I sat and grumped then thought of all the times I have broken yarn while knitting (quite a few times as I'm a bad knitter) so I decided to experiment and cut up an old red t-shirt of H's and tie strips of yarn together.... the strips were thick so the yarn was chunky but it worked and knit rather well while I sat with an iced latte in Starbucks. After the red I cut up one of H's white t-shirts, this time in thinner strips which when pulled out and tied together made a thinner more flexible yarn.

*My last attempt was a teal t-shirt of mine that was from Primark and as such the seams were crooked to begin with.

*I cut all the seams away and folded up the front rectangle of fabric and cut it into narrow strips. (they aren't all together even and my scissors decided to fall apart on me


*I then pulled all the strips out so that the fabric curled back on itself and carefully tied the strips together. I trimmed the loose knots and wound the t-shirt yarn into a ball.


*I started knitting with it, only a skinny scarf of 5 stitches across but I'm pleased with how it looks so far and will update when I finish the scarf.