Repurposed t-shirts: What to do with your animal welfare shirts

Before my schedule derailed into a mess of appointments and tests, I tackled a huge closet clean-out. We bagged up sweaters, pants, and tons of shirts, but for some reason I had a hard time parting with the massive pile of animal welfare t-shirts I’ve accumulated.

You know those shirts you get at events, runs, rescues, walks, conferences, and more? It seems like they never fit. Or you wear them on daily dog walks and they wear out super fast.

My drawer overflowed with those shirts, shirts I never, ever wore. But they all had a fun memory associated with them, so I came up with an alternative use: I repurposed all those old animal welfare t-shirts into a blanket for the boys!

We have this nasty chair:

It’s old. It’s stained. The arms are toothpicks from when Lucas was a pup. It sits in the corner of the office, and the boys take turns sleeping there when I’m working. Instead of replacing it since they love it so much, I wanted to get a blanket to cover it.

I gathered a big stack of animal-related t-shirts.

I cut out the front panel of each shirt. I aimed to get a 14″ x 14″ square from each.

Here is a good place to pause and say that I am not very good at sewing. I can’t measure, and I go too quickly. However, this was a super simple project because it was just straight lines. I started by sewing together four of the shirts, side by side. Then repeated for two more rows of four.

Since my measuring was off, I tried to correct it once I had the rows finished. Then I sewed the three rows together.

For the back, I had this huge piece of fuzzy fabric my mom gave me. Emmett is fond of fuzzy.

I just did straight lines the whole way around to attach the t-shirts to the fuzzy – no fancy quilting or slipstiching for me!

Ta daaa! I tossed it on the chair, and Cooper tested it out.

Then Emmett kicked him off and went right to sleep… I think it’s a sign that he likes it!

Some of the organizations that appear in their repurposed animal welfare t-shirt blanket (that’s a mouthful!) include:

• Monroe County Humane Association – and I used the back of that one, too, so they could have the logo of their pet sitters on their blanket
• BlogPaws, of course
• Help Joey
• Indy Pit Crew
• and Super Levi’s super cute t-shirt

It was an easy project that gave me the perfect way to use those t-shirts instead of having to get rid of them!

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