T-shirt upcycle. Weaving - a bowl?

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A while ago, I found a tutorial for weaving a rug from strips of t-shirt yarn.  

As I was sorting through my large pile of clothes to be upcycled, I found a lot of t-shirts and thought I'd give the weaving a go!.

So here's the pile of t-shirts, and one of my daughter's hula hoops:

I cut strips from a white t-shirt to loop around the hoop for starters.

Then I cut some continuous strips from other t-shirts, by cutting around the main part of the t-shirt in a spiral. 

And off I went..

To join strips of yarn together end to end, I tried one method first, but came up with a problem when I wanted to attach the beginning of a whole ball of yard and couldn't fit the ball through the hole!

So I took to just tying it with a reef knot - nice and simple. The weaving wasn't perfect fabric and perfectly smooth (at all) so I wasn't worried about a few small knots here and there.

My youngest daughter wanted to have a go when she came home from school. And she wove as fast as I could cut and roll balls of yarn!

As we wove on, we found that we'd probably pulled the yarn a bit too tight initially and the rug we had intended to make wasn't very flat!

So we decided to stop, cut and tie the ends (again just using reef knots) and then trim the ends.

And here is what we ended up with..

It's quite a sturdy bowl, perfect for holding more t-shirt yarn balls!

Or even a fruit bowl!

We are going to try this again, and try to keep the tension a bit looser to see if we can make a rug with the remaining yarn!

Have you ever tried making things with t-shirt yarn?

I'll make sure and post photos of our next attempt at a woven t-shirt rug. Hopefully the next one will turn out flat!