Experiment time from last week: homemade tubular yarn
This last year has been full of t-shirt yarn tutorials. (Go ahead, do a google searh for ‘t-shirt yarn tutorial.’ You’ll get a gazillion results.) I purchased a few skeins of tubular yarn for a pattern, and it was pricey. So it’s fun to recycle old t-shirts into yarn (I’m all about free!), but what do you do with it? Since said pattern didn’t work out, I now have expensive stash sitting in my trunk. It’s been there since LYS Purls closed, over a two years ago.
I found only one use for the yarn so far — a dishcloth. Cotton t-shirt yarn makes very sturdy fabric with a nice texture. Glampyre Knits, aka Stefanie Japel, created shrug and scarf patterns for this yarn. The photos on her website (haven’t bought the classes or patterns) seem to use dyed t-shirts, and I don’t know that I want a dye job right now. I understand why you would dye, but I’m not in that situation at the moment.
I decided a dishcloth would benefit from the stretch and texture of the fabric the t-shirt knitted up.
Post Script: Making the yarn and knitting with it leaves a lot of little ‘crumbs’ around. As this dishcloth sits on my table, it is leaving more little blue crumbs. I am hoping that as it is used, this will stop. I may do a swagbucks search on this to find prevention techniques, see how long this will last, see if I’m just abnormal when I make the yarn, etc.