Hippie Project?

As many of you already know, I crochet and knit in my spare time and to relieve stress.  While exploring the Internet the other day and looking at upcycling ideas on Pinterest, I found "tee-shirt" yarn.  A lovely Hawaiian lady gave explicit instructions on how to create this yarn and it looked pretty easy to me.  I decided to give it a try.

Well, it wasn't quite as easy as she made it look.  After several tries of cutting up tee-shirts and getting a bunch of little strips instead of one long string of yarn, I decided to examine her tutorial once more.  I found out what I was doing wrong(cutting straight across instead of in a diagonal) and proceeded to make several balls of tee-shirt yarn. 

Now the question was, where to get tee-shirts to cut up? I knew that Randy and the kids would not appreciate me stealing their tee-shirts to make my yarn, and I had already gone through my tee-shirts to make the first few balls.  Luckily for me, I love to go shopping at our consignment store here in town, and they often have free stuff outside of the store(can you say "crap that no one would even buy for a low, low price but Andrea will snatch up because it's free?")  One day as I drove by, there was a giant garbage bag of tee-shirts out in the free stuff!  I brought them home, washed them up, and proceeded to make yarn to my heart's content. 

So far, I have been crocheting baskets out of this yarn.  It will work well for bags too I think, because it is nice and heavy.  My family has been teasing me something terrible about my new yarn.  I have been reminded that ladies in the 1800's made rugs out of old clothes, and that recycling tee-shirts is probably something that makes me a hippie.  The hippie comment got me thinking.  There are tons of hippies in Laramie, why not sell them my tee-shirt baskets and bags?  So, this is my future plan.  I have only completed one basket so far and am working on a second.  When I get it done, I will put a picture of it on here for you to see.

By the way, after an hour of work with the shop-vac, I got all of the baking soda out of the carpet!  Victory is mine!