T-Shirt Haiku from DIY Scraps

Create poetry with up-cycled T-shirt scraps. Turn your old tees into one-of-a-kind works of individualized art.

Someone donated a bunch of old T-shirts for my (failed) attempt at making 3d printed templates. So I found myself with lot's of tees that didn't fit me/ I slashed a few in my experiments, but I still had lots left over/

I figured I could make a few hoods and scarves and pillows. But what could I do with all those free swag tee shirts from 2014? Too bad I couldn't just use elements from each of the designs and make something new.

Or wait... maybe I could. I do have scissors and I do have fabric glue. Heck, I even own a sewing machine if I wanted to get serious.







So I sat down with the scissors and a bag of old shirts during the Olympics and started cutting out words from the front and back of 20 shirts.

It was a perfect task. Unlike most of my hobbies I could start and stop with no ill effects. I didn't lose my train of thought, the tee didn't dry, crack, sag or over-process in any way.

I enjoyed the parts of the Olympics I wanted and the holes in the tee shirts stayed just as they were and when I came back I just started cutting again.

What I thought would be a tedious task turned out to be a lot of fun. In fact, I think it helped me enjoy the Olympic events even more.

Nervous about whether your fave is going to make it into semi-finals - well cut apart some tee shirts.

Your favorite might be getting knocked off the podium - make the cuts extra ragged. Heck the more ragged and nervous looking the better, just makes it look really hand made.










Of course making the scraps into a work of art is another story. Once I realized that I could never color coordinate or match sizes or fonts - well then it became fun again and I had some flashbacks to my teen tears and rebellious designing. Shew, this adulting in design thing had messed with my sense of freedom and spontaneity.

So this was a good, I got a sense of fun back, made something fun from discarded clothes, and even found a bright-sided silvered-lining to the filed craft-knife experiments. This was a fun win.

Of course my short poem writing skills had also atrophied. But I listened to some music, realized the lyrics actually made no sense and if they could do it then I could do it, I composed three amaze-balls poems in just a few minutes. And I think I got back with my teen self here as well.

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