I made a rug

I used to have a prodigious t-shirt collection, mostly shirts you get from participating in sports and school activities and travelling. My style, activities, and size have evolved over the years so I cut up my old shirts to make a t-shirt quilt. That only required the front and/or back design so I kept the shirt remnants. I cut up the remnants into strips to make t-shirt yarn. Most of the shirts are about 1.5" wide strips but some I did wider if they were a thinner fabric in order to maintain consistent yarn size. 

I made myself a loom based on this tutorial, strung it with some yarn I had on hand, then wove this lovely rug. 

I started out by looping the lengths of t-shirt yarn together like the tutorial shows but later I discovered that gluing the strips was faster, a lot less work, and produced a smoother rug. I use this fabric adhesive. It sets up fast and strong and rubs off easily if you get it on your fingers. It doesn't dry clear though and it can be easy to use too much so be careful if you choose to use something similar. Also it's latex based so allergy alert.

I use this rug in my kitchen and it feels nice underfoot. 

Something I'll do differently next time is use steel rods instead of dowels if I do another big rug to keep the outside straight and even because the dowels bowed inward despite my attempt to keep them in place with nails. It made the rug a wonky shape. I went back over the rug after the main weaving to take out extra yarn here or adding a section there to help it be a more regular rectangle but it still is a little uneven. It does the job and I learned something making it and I recycled so I feel good about it.

Lest you falsely assume I'm on the ball, I collected the t-shirts for a quilt like 6 years ago, cut out the quilt squares and assembled the quilt like 4 years ago, stored and moved the scraps across the country, cut up the scraps into t-shirt yarn like 1.5 years ago, made the loom about a year ago, and then finally made a rug a few months ago. So, yeah. I'm not going into commercial production anytime soon.