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Writer's pictureKatie Rowe

How to make yarn out of old clothes

There are a lot of ways to repurpose clothing that is too run down to wear or donate. If the item is beyond repair and you're not up for refashioning, making chunky yarn is an easy way to preserve the utility of the material and save it from the landfill.* You can use your yarn for knitting, crochet, and weaving projects, wind into rope, or just keep it around the house as a general utility cord. The properties of the yarn will vary a lot with the material and composition of the original fabric, so be sure to make some samples if you are going to use it to knit or crochet.

*If you have a clothing item that you really can't save, consider recycling options like GrowNYC. Note that they have suspended collection during Covid-19.

 

You'll need:

  1. A piece of old clothing

  2. Scissors

  3. (optional) Seam ripper

  4. (optional) Needle and thread or sewing machine


Instructions

 

Step 1: Understand what the existing imperfections and weaknesses of your clothing item are. In my case, there were several large rips in this pair of leggings. I had repaired them a few times, but they kept coming apart, especially along one of the inseams. That was part of why I ripped out the seams first, before removing the hems.

Step 2: Open up the seams. Depending on the clothing item, you could either rip out the seams with a seam ripper or just cut alongside them. I chose to do the latter so I could save the fabric bit from the seam for other uses.

Step 3: Remove the elastic hems at the bottom of the pant legs. Keep these!!! They work well as hair ties, rubber bands, mask straps, etc...

Step 4: Sever the link between the front and back portions, and open up the center seam on both.

Step 5: Remove the elastic waistband. Again, keep this! You could use it for any project you need elastic for.

Step 6: You should now have 2 separate pieces of fabric. My next step was to trim off the seam fabric all around the edges. It has a really interesting stretchy but durable quality to it that I find works really well for mask straps.

Step 7: Then cut each fabric panel into strips, between 1/2" and 1" wide depending on how chunky you want your yarn to be. If you're working with woven cotton or similar, you may be able to rip it into strips instead - that does not work well with these woven leggings.

Step 8: Either sew or tie the strips together, roll into a ball, and you're done. The ball shown here is from one of two fabric panels from this pair of leggings. I used the other to make a new set of facemasks with some of my hem yarn as straps (I will post about that next!).

Here's what it looks like on a sample swatch using size 10.5 knitting needles:



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