Today’s blog post features a turtle or tortoise rug which we crocheted from old T-shirts. 🙂
To do this, you will first have to make ‘tarn‘, which is short for T-shirt yarn. To make tarn, you will need several old T-shirts. First cut off all the parts that you do not want to have in your yarn, like the edge of the neck or any seam. Then cut the T-shirt into stripes of roughly the same width: for tarn that is about 1 cm (0.35 inch) wide (which makes a thin rug or potholder), cut parallel stripes into the T-shirt from one side that are 2 cm (0.7 inch) apart. However, it is important (!) that you don’t cut the T-shirt through the whole length but leave a continuous edge at the far side (your half-cut tarn ought to look a bit like a comb – one continuous edge from which the cut stripes originate). When you have cut the whole width of your T-shirt, turn your ‘comb-shaped’ T-shirt around, the continuous edge now facing towards you. Each of the stripes is still 2 cm (o.7inch) wide. Now cut these 2cm-wide stripes in half, starting from the continuous edge and leaving another continuous edge at the end of each stripe, so that you will have a continuous yarn. (If you cut the stripes through by accident or error, you will have to sew them together into a long piece of yarn!). If you want to have a really thick rug, make thicker tarn: our rug in the photo was made from tarn that is 4cm wide (1.8 inch), so each initial stripe we cut into the T-shirt was 8cm (3.25inch) wide. The turtle rug was made from 5 T-shirts (size L).
When you have made your tarn, crochet or knit your tarn into your desired shape, mixing and matching tarn of different colours as you please, e.g. creating a rainbow or stripe design. 🙂
EcoTurtleUpcycling & Zero Waste 