How To Make T-Shirt Yarn

T-shirt yarn is getting popular in recent years. Besides the normal yarn that you use for crochet and knitting, now you have another brilliant material for your next project. T-shirt yarn is a bulky weight, which means you can whip up a project quickly. Apart from buying the t-shirt yarn from the shelf, you can DIY the T-shirt yarn at home by using your old unwanted T-shirts. Read further on how to make T Shirt yarn at home.

Another tutorial to help in saving our Mother Earth by turning unwanted items into something useful. This is the T-shirt yarn ball I made out of an old T-shirt which I have been wearing for 10 years day-in day-out, wash-in wash-out. It finally broke down and tore at the collar and sleeves. Waste not, want not, I decided to recycle it.

Making t-shirt yarn not only helps to repurpose the old t-shirt; but it is also so fun to produce something beautiful t-shirt yarn crafts at the end of the day.

How To Make T-Shirt Yarn

scroll ⬇️ to get the how-to-make tutorial

The chunky T-shirt yarn is perfect to crochet and knit into a t-shirt yarn basket, bag, rug, scarf, etc… I have finished making the T-Shirt yarn drawstring bag as shown below. Please click here to have a look and you can download the simple pattern I created.

Other than the crochet project, you could use the T-Shirt Yarn to make purses, handbags, rag rug, stripy scarf, knit a rug, braid a rope, etc. Here are the Top 20 t-shirt yarn projects you can make.

Sometimes, people will call T-Shirt Yarn as T-arn or Tarn, which is a short form word of the combination of T-shirt and Yarn.

T-Shirt Yarn

Recycle Tutorial

Tools & Materials:
1. T-shirts (those without side-seam)
2. A pair of sharp scissors

Place the T-shirt flat on the floor or working table.

We only need the bottom-halve portion of the T-shirt. Cut horizontally from sleeve to sleeve as shown above. Cut away the end border of the T-shirt too. This useful” portion must be plain and free from printing, embroidery and any joints or seams. Any motifs will be too hard for the T-shirt to turn into tubular yarn.

Fold the T-shirt from side to side, leaving an inch allowance as shown.

Cut into strips as shown, remember not to cut the 1-inch allowance. Leave it there as we are going to use this to form a continuous strip.
The width of the strip will determine the thickness of your yarn, but the minimum is 15mm, anything less than this, the process will fail. The width shown here is 15mm.

Finish cutting the T-shirt from top to bottom evenly.

Unfold the 1-inch allowance and it will look as shown below.
The red lines are the cutting lines to be explained below.

The next process is to make a slant cut from strip 1 to strip 2, strip 2 to strip 3 and so on in order to create a continuous strip for the whole T-shirt. Please refer above picture for the slant cut.

I purposely leave the first strip uncut until I have finished all. No catch, just my preference to show you better how the slanting looks like.

Now, I have a long strip of continuous T-shirt yarn waiting for the next process.

Next is to turn the strip into a tubular yarn. All you need to do is tug the strip as shown below. Remember I told you that the minimum width of the strip is 15mm? The secret is…. if you have anything narrower than this, it will break once you pull.

See, the strip will curl and form a tubular shape after the tug. This process will lengthen the yarn too, which is good, so you have more yarn to work on your project.
….tug…
….tug…
….tug…

The strip has now turned into tubular yarn, from Fettuccine to Spaghetti ***wink***. You can roll your yarn into a ball and it is ready for your next project.
HAPPY YARNING!!!