Right after Christmas Jay had vacation time to take. While home he decided to go through his dresser and get rid of shirts he no longer wore. I was hoping to donate them to charity, but they were either stained or had holes burned in them. Yet, I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away.

There were almost a dozen shirts. My mom crochets rugs out of scraps and denim jeans, so I thought I would try to use these t-shirts. I searched the internet for an easy pattern, and while I was involved in that search I came across a tutorial on how to make t-shirt yarn. It looked fairly simple, so I gave it a try.

I cut my strips into 3/4″ wide pieces as I didn’t want to be dealing with thick yarn. I have to admit that the step to turn the material into rounded yarn was mindless and enjoyable. I liken it to popping bubbles on bubble wrap. It’s so silly, but you can’t help yourself. To turn this flat strip into this:

… all you do is tug on it lengthwise. That’s it! I know that scientifically it probably has to do with the weave and how you cut the t-shirt, but it’s still absolutely fascinating to me. This kept me occupied for a few hours as I had almost a dozen yarn balls to make.

I picked a pattern that was in my ‘Crochet World 40+ Must-Make Projects’ magazine that I’ve been drooling over since Fall. I’m not good at crocheting in the round, so I decided to go with a rectangular pattern. I’ve already decided that this will be used for the cats somewhere in the house, so it doesn’t matter what it looks like.

This is what I have so far. I worked on it for three days last week and I’ve had to put it aside. It killed my wrist! I need to figure out how to support my wrist a little better because it takes a bit of pulling for this to really crochet nicely. My wrist hurt so much that I didn’t dare pick up any of my crocheting for about three days. When I finally picked up the latest afghan that I’m working on I wore a support brace and only did one row of stitches. I didn’t want to aggravate it. Luckily, I’ve had some help.

You can barely see that Chester’s paw is touching my crochet hook. I told her that just because she’s touching it doesn’t mean that she’s actually crocheting. She just ignored me. She thinks that when I turn this blanket in to Project Linus that I’m going to give her partial credit for it. We’ll see.