chickinspired

What does it take to transform a pile of old T-shirts into spectacular works of woven art? Just a spare hula hoop or embroidery hoop and the techniques we’ll show you here. The oversize looms and easy-to-use loops of T-shirt fabric make these projects particularly appealing to beginning weavers. Learn the basic hoop weaving technique by crafting a colorful accent rug to brighten up a room. And if you want to take the weaving a little further, check out our basket and chair pad weaves

Before you begin, some terms you need to know: the warp is the material you string on the hoop, the weft is the material you weave with.
Materials
Scissors
About a dozen T-shirts
33-inch hula hoop

Instructions
1. For the warp, cut 1-inch-wide loops from the bodies of one or two tees (we found a boy’s large worked best on our 33-inch hoop), removing the hem and stopping at the sleeves. Ideally these loops should all be the same color; we used two colors for clarity in our photographs. You’ll need a total of 11 loops. For the weft, cut at least 50 loops from the remaining shirts. Save the unused sleeves for the basket project.

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2. Stretch one warp loop over the hula hoop, as shown.

3.Add and secure a second loop, perpendicular to the first.

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4. Repeat, filling in the spaces, until all 11 loops are in place.

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5. Push together two warp loops at the top of the hula hoop, as shown. This creates an odd number of warp spokes in your wheel, which allows the overunder pattern of the weft to alternate with each new row.

6. Secure the first weft loop to the center of one of the warp spokes (we chose the doubled spoke from step 5) by wrapping it around the warp and then looping it back through itself.