How to Make T-shirt Shoelaces

Last week I showed you how to make continuous t-shirt yarn.  Since then I have been on a rampage using the yarn for different projects.  Today I am making shoelaces from the t-shirt yarn.  This is especially fun to show off school colors or to coordinate your shoelaces with a certain outfit.  The colors are as endless as the colored tee shirts out there – which if you go to a thrift store you know they have every color of the rainbow.

 

Supplies:

T-shirt yarn

scissors

shoes

heat gun or hair dryer

stick pin

1.  Cut a length of t-shirt yarn to the length you want it.  For my canvas shoes I used 37”.  I figured out the length by removing the existing shoelace and using that for my measurement.

2.  Slide about a 1” piece of 3/16″ Heat Shrink  onto the end of your yarn leaving a little bit of a tail.

3.  Use a stick pin to hold it in place while you blast it with a heat gun.  This takes about 7 seconds.  If you choose to use a hair dryer it takes a lot longer.

4.  Let them cool, then cut a tiny bit of the heat shrink and the tail off.  Repeat steps 2-4 for the other end of the tee shirt yarn.

The heat shrink makes it easy to thread through the shoe eyelets.

I added two colors to each shoe but you can do just one if you want.  This is obviously a fairly cheap way to replace shoelaces.  Your biggest expense is the heat shrink which can be purchased for about the price of a new pair of shoelaces at Target or Wal-mart.

Do you love upcycling old t-shirts?  Check out these posts for more inspiration.

Left to Right: Ransom Note Sweatshirt, Painted Striped Shirt, Patriotic T-shirt Dress, Upcycled Stamped Dress, Stamped Valentine’s Day Scarf, Patchy Skirt.