A Mountain of Old T-Shirts

I've jumped on the bandwagon!!

The upcycle/recycle T-Shirt bandwagon that is.

Seems sometimes I'm a little behind with trends,

that's life!

My adult kids had just cleaned out their closets and 

I had a humongous box of T-Shirts -

ripped, stained, outgrown, etc. ready to be disposed of.

I've seen T-shirt projects everywhere,

using up your old T-Shirts that were 

on their way to the trash heap.

Heaven forbid!

'Use it up

Wear it out

Make it do

Or do without'

Just keep them out of the landfill! 

It just so happened I needed a new throw rug for my hall bath.

The current one was falling apart and, well, you could almost see through it 😕

So I started planning. The bathroom is beach themed,

 so I dug and dug through the box for beach themed hues for the rug. Being I had limited colors to choose from, I chose:

tans representing beach sand,

blues representing the water in the ocean,

greens representing seaweed and algae,

whites representing the frothing of the waves.

I started out with my cutting mat, rotary cutting tool, and my chosen pile of old t-shirts.

For the ''base'' of the rug I cut the arms off a black shirt, cut down each side seam so I could open it up and lay it out flat. 

I then cut it into as much of a rectangle as possible.

But you can cut it into any shape you'd like.

Now the tedious part.

You need to cut slits in rows through the entire ''base'' of the rug.

I snipped slits one row at a time with scissors.

I tried to keep them as consistent as possible,

but in the end any inconsistencies won't be noticed.

Next I cut up the "beach colored" shirts into strips 

approximately 5'' - 6'' long and 1 1/2'' - 2'' wide. 

I kept my strips in piles by color and grabbed 

a little of each as I went along so I wouldn't run out 

of any color too early.

Now to add the strips.

Basically feed one strip down through the first hole, 

up through the next,

and tie a knot.  Repeat until the base is covered.

The finished back 

Here is the finished product....

It works well and I have already 

washed it in the washer on delicate.

Now, what to do with all the leftover strips of T-shirts????