Braided Rug from Recycled T-Shirts

This is one of my largest t-shirt recycling projects. We started it several years ago, but took a break because I wasn't very good at sewing by hand. First, we cut all the shirts into strips. There's a few ways to do this. There's the t-shirt yarn method we learned at Maker Faire- cut the shirt into a long continuous strip by cutting in at the hem and then going around and around. Or we could lay the shirt flat and cut across with a rotary cutter on a cutting mat, making loops. These could be looped together, or cut at the end and then sewn together to make long strips, which is what we did. We decided it was easier to only sew on one or two strips at a time so it wouldn't get tangled when braiding. The strips tend to curl, which is good if you want to hide the patterns or pictures on the front of the shirts. There's some Mickey Mouse and other cartoons hidden in this rug.

Mom did most of the braiding, and I spliced the strips together. Then we used a heavy sewing thread to hand stitch the braid into a large spiral.