Old Clothing

[da]

Worth passing on, because I know at least some of my f'list has wondered about the same thing. (yay for composting fabric?!)

http://www.grist.org/advice/ask/2006/07/05/old_clothes/

I'm wondering about the best way to dispose of old clothes and shoes -- the tired, well-loved, and much-worn items that thrift shops really don't want. I wear my clothes until the bitter end, and then I just don't know what to do with them. Old T-shirts make great rags, but then what?

Comments

[fyddlestyx.livejournal.com]

Actually, old t shirts are also great to cut into a continuous strip yarn.. and you can make all sorts of things from them.. including baskets, rugs, bags. Or cut into a continuous yarn, ball the yarn up, and donate to art teachers or camps for projects. Cut old jeans into squares and donate to a quilting guild. And some knitters these days are trawling thrift shops for sweaters to deconstruct into yarn, overdye and reuse.

Sadelle.. who has done most of the above, and just last night deconstructed a sweater to harvest its yarn. ;-)

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Cool. Now, that sounds tremendously useful. And cathartic besides.

I've never seen somebody unravel a cotton shirt. Maybe I'll give it a shot.

What do you do about the portions with silk-screening on them? Does it get hand-scraped off the yarn?

Without trying it yet, it seems to me that you'd end up with hundreds of 2-meter long pieces of yarn, with cuts at each seam. What do you do about the stitches? Use a seam-ripper on them?