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By Mom Unplugged, February 22, 2009 8:25 pm

The theme for this week’s Unplugged Project was clothing. We had a few ideas, but ultimately decided to experiment with weaving strips of fabric made from an old shirt.

First: the nasty shirt.

This is a shirt that had been a comfortable favorite of mine for quite some time. Too much time. It was stretched and shapeless and discolored. Très chic, don’t you think? I knew it was time for the shirt and I to part company. But since I didn’t even think it was in decent enough shape to donate, it was clearly a perfect candidate for shredding.

I cut the sleeves off, and then cut the shirt in half along the seams. I cut the side and bottom seams off, as well as the neck. I was left with two flat pieces of fabric.

The kids thought I had gone mad at first when they saw me cutting up my shirt, but then they got into the spirit of the moment and I had a hard time getting my cut up shirt back to finish the job!

We cut each section of the shirt into an oval shape and then began cutting it into a single spiral strip about 1/2 inch wide (approx 1.25 cm).

This was the result:

We wound the two lots of cloth into balls:

Next we got out our $2.00 picture frame loom. I warped it with the fabric by winding a single strip up and down around the nails. I have seen this done, but … hmmm… I didn’t like it much.

This was an experiment. Next time, I would warp it like our yarn dollhouse rug, by cutting single strips and tying one on each set of nails. We got a bit confused because there were two warp strips on each nail. Since this rug was “rustic,” a few mistakes didn’t really matter. In fact one could optimistically say that they actually enhanced the rug. But now I know that I prefer to have one warp string on each nail.

I wrapped the cloth around the shuttle and we began weaving.

To finish it up, I lifted each loop off the nail, cut it, and tied the two ends together in a sturdy knot.

The final result:

We used it to keep the dolls’ feet toasty in their bathroom, but it could also be a potholder, or even a dish washing cloth (that’s what my husband thought it was).

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If you did a clothing Unplugged Project this week, then please link to your project in the Mr. Linky below. If not, then follow the links to everyone’s project and enjoy! If you are interested in learning more about how to join us, then please read about it here. We’d love to have you!

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The theme for next week’s Unplugged Project will be:

Bottle

Enjoy!

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