T-Shirt Yarn & Knit Throw

Ever wondered what to do with all your old t-shirts? Here's an idea: Knit a Throw and Quilt a Blanket.

I've been saving t-shirts since college, either designs I like or from shirts special events. The plan has always been to make a t-shirt quilt, but when I finally started cutting the shirts for the quilt, I found I had a lot of extra fabric.

Trying to decide what to do with all this extra t-shirt fabric, I remembered a recent fad on Pinterest to make t-shirt yarn.

Here's a quick look at what I've been doing with each shirt to get the most out of the fabric.

These are the cuts that I do to each shirt, making sure that the design has enough blank space around it for taste and seam allowances.

I cut off the hems and cut out all of the seams from the shoulders and armpits. These seams around the armpits, shoulders and collar are the only parts of the shirt I discard.

The sleeve and bottom hems I cut the joining seams out (if there are any), leaving the hem intact and as a long strip. Then I attach all the hems together using Stop Her, She's Knitting's technique for joining t-shirt strips.

The hem yarn I add to an ever growing ball that I'll likely make a bag out of later.

Everything else on the shirt I use to make a ball of yarn, aside from the design. That is put aside for my quilt project. The bottom tube and sleeves are made into a long strips of yarn via Polka Dot Pineapple's method and then the blank back of the shirt I cut into long strips. I attach all the strips together to get a pretty decent sized ball of yarn.

With all the yarn produced, I decided to knit a simple throw for the couch, something I could add to through the years and not worry about the exact measurements of my yarn.

Each shirt section is 10 stitches wide and I knit until I run out of yarn for that shirt. The plan is to loosely cast-off when I run out of shirts for this batch and undo the cast-off when I want to add more in the future. The yarn is pretty forgiving (hello single ply) and I'm not too worried about knots or gauges.

Don't mind the mess on my table. It doesn't always look that bad... Swear.