Recycle Craft: T-shirt Tote

Difficulty: Intermediate
Age: 7 and up (with help from adults as necessary)


Description:
Have some old T-shirts that are too wasteful to throw yet too old to wear? How about take some time and turn it into a useful recycle T-shirt Tote?


What you'll need:
1. One old T-shirt
2. Scissors
3. Ruler
4. Pencil
5. Permanent Marker
 
How to make it:

 
1. This is the old T-shirt I use.






 

2. Cut the sleeves away. The sleeves' hole will serve as the Tote's holder. Keep the seam to have strong holder. Save the cut out sleeves' cloth for later use.






 

 3. Fold the T-shirt into half vertically at centre and cut off the collar of the T-shirt as in the picture on the left to create the opening for the Tote.

4. With front and back together, fold the bottom of the T-shirt up 1.5 inch.

5. Cut slits of 0.5 inch apart up to the hem across the width of bag. Do this with assistance of a ruler and make some markings with pencil before you cut. The slits will look as in the picture on the left.

6. Cut the same amount of stripes of 0.5 inch width by 4 inch length using the cloth cut out from the sleeves in Step 2.

7. With the strips, tie knots at the bottom of the T-shirt across the slits tying both front and back together. This should close up the bottom of the T-shirt so that it would hold the things and become a bag.

8. Complete the knots tying across all the slits. The completed one will look like the following. The other side of the bag will look as in the bottom.

 9. It done!

Tips:
1. You may cut the sleeves and collars deeper into the T-shirt to create a Tote with longer holders.
2. To add some personal touch to the T-shirt Tote, create some design by drawing or writing something on the bag using the permanent marker or arcylic paint.
3. For bigger Tote, use T-shirt of bigger size, for a smaller T-shirt tote, use a smaller one.
4. If you use a sleeveless T-shirt, just start from Step 3.
5. To create more colour to the tote, you may also opt to use ribbons instead of the cut out cloth from the sleeves to tie the slits. Just skip Step 6 and continue with Step 7.