T-shirt Yarn Making - Using (Almost) All Parts of the Shirt

Making yarn from cotton shirts can be a great way to redirect unwanted garment from landfill. It is also an awesome opportunity to create interesting mix and match of colours in the finish product. 

I learned how to make this yarn from various online tutorials. But unfortunately after a few times making them, I realised there was still some excess fabric that ended up in the rubbish bin. I recently had some time to figure this out and try to find a way to utilise as much shirt fabric as I possible can. My end goal is to minimise the amount of excess material that ends up in landfill. 

I hope this will be useful for others to try as well. 

1. The first step is to separate the bottom and top part of the shirt. In most of the online tutorial that I learned from, the top part of the shirt is discarded and the work continues with the bottom part of the shirt. 

  

2. I take the top part of the shirt and cut through the underarm sleeves seam. 

 

At this point, I also cut the clothing label: (Sadly, the label will go to the rubbish bin)

3. Then I lay the top part of the shirt flat, like this:

And, I start cutting the fabric in continuous round:

This takes a bit more effort but you will get more yarn in the end, so it's really worth it.

4. At some point during this process, you will encounter a dead end. Usually at the point where the front neckline band is. I cut away this part and continue cutting along the rest of the neckline to maintain a continuous fabric cutting. For this particular shirt, I can save the small bit of the front neckline band and use it for soft plant ties. (More on this in Step 6)

 

5. Then, I continue cutting in round as before following the shape of the fabric remain. 

6. For this shirt, there was a small piece of fabric in rectangular shape. I cut this into thin long strips and use them for soft plant ties. 

My collection of soft plant ties from various cotton fabric remains.

7. The rest of the work involves the bottom part of the shirt. There is a lot of online tutorial for this and they are very easy to follow. The bottom part of the shirt is laid flat (I like to place the side seams of the shirt in the middle). Then I cut thin long strips but not all the way through:

8. The section at the top where the fabric was still joined together are then cut diagonally to maintain continuous fabric strip.:

9. The last step is the most satisfying of all and that is when you roll the thin strips of fabric into a ball of yarn:

It's unlimited what you can make out of this... Happy Days!!

Sp, that's the whole process and in the end there were only a very small amount of materials that ended up in the rubbish bin. They are the clothing labels, store tags and a very small piece of odd shape fabric:

I hope others will find this useful and let me know what other ways can be done to fully utilise an unwanted piece of clothing. I can't wait to make more of this and create beautiful and practical items to be used around home.