Upcycling T-shirts: How to make tarn (tutorial)

Today’s blog post takes up the topic of last week’s post, namely upcycling T-shirts and how to make ‘tarn‘, i.e. yarn made from old T-shirts. 🙂 All you need are some old T-shirts (or other jersey garments) and a pair of scissors.

Tutorial : How to make tarn

1. First cut off any parts of your T-shirts, jersey leggins, etc. which you do not want to have in your finished yarn: normally these are the tags inside the garments, the seams and edges.

2. Depending on what sort of item you want to make from your tarn, you first need to determine the width of your tarn. A good width for a thick, heavy bathroom rug is a tarn width of about 4 cm (1.6 inch), for a kitchen potholder 3 cm (1.2 inch) and for thinner items a width of about 1 cm (0.4 inch). When you have found the correct tarn width for your intended project, cut parallel strips into the fabric which measure double (!) the width of your finished tarn: so for a 4cm -tarn, you will need to cut strips that are 8cm wide, for a 2cm-tarn, strips measuring 4cm, etc. Important: Don’t cut the strips through the whole length of the fabric, but leave a continous edge of fabric at the far side of your shirt!

3. When you have cut the fabric into parallel strips (of double width) with a continous edge at one side, turn your garment upside down and cut the strips into half from the other side, but again leaving a continous edge at the top.

Your original garment ought now to be a long strip of tarn (T-shirt yarn) 🙂 . If you have lengths of tarn from several pieces of the garment, sew these together at one end to make a long string of tarn, then roll up your tarn into a ball. Knit or crochet the item you want to make from it. 🙂

Upcycling: Turtle ‘tarn’ rug (how to upcycle T-shirts)

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. 🙂