Around Thanksgiving, on one of my first Christmas shopping trips (this one on Portland’s fashionable NW 23rd Avenue), I found a cool scarf that I thought I would get for my niece. The scarf was made of many long thin strips of a jersey material, tied together at a couple of places. It came with a booklet of suggestions for different ways it could be worn: draped loosely around your neck, braided as a belt, twisted around your head.
The one drawback was the hefty pricetag: $70 for the one I liked.
As soon as I got home I started looking online for a similar scarf. I couldn’t find one like the one I had seen. I did find the site of another blogger who had made her own from a recycled T-shirt.
As soon as I arrived in St. Louis, my sister-in-law and I headed for the nearest Target where we picked out 4 X-Large T-shirts. We couldn’t find the seamless ones recommended on the website, but decided to give it a try with the ones we could get.
Once home I reviewed the instructions and got started. The first step was to cut off the hem and the top part of the shirt, including the sleeves. Then I started cutting strips from the tube of material that remained.
I cut each of the resulting loops along one of the seams to create thirteen long strips of fabric,
and tugged on each strip causing them to lengthen and curl.
I then took 12 of the 13 strips I had made and divided them into three bunches, braiding them together to form the center of the scarf. I used the thirteenth strip (which I first cut into two shorter strips) to tightly wrap the ends of the braid to hold them in place.
In the end, I made a total of four scarves, one for each of the women in my family. They are already in frequent use and get noticed wherever we go.
knitting a life 