Hand Weaved Doggy Collars and Friendship Bracelets!

Hand weaved friendship bracelets made from upcycled t-shirt yarn

Today I’m going to show you how to make Hand Weaved Doggy Collars and Friendship Bracelets out of upcycled t-shirt ‘yarn’.

I’m super excited to head back to my home town, East Lansing, Michigan and then up to Torch Lake in Michigan to hang out with 3 of my close high school pals – one now lives in Nevada, one lives in Georgia, and one still in good ole’ Michigan. What I love is that we can be so goofy and carefree when we’re together. We have fun reminding each other of stories from when we were crazy teenagers. Hard to believe now we all have our own kids that age. We first started reconnecting at our high school reunions. A few years ago we decided the big re-unions every 5 years were not soon enough to get together. Now we do our best to have our ‘girls retreats’ with all 4 of us once a year. Last year we met up in San Diego. This year we’ll all get back to our home turf.

 Now let’s get to how to make these cute, stylish, chunky braided bracelets!

Here’s a list of what you’ll need:

Old t-shirt

Sharp fabric scissors

Reading glasses? (ha! Not quite yet!…am I in denial??)

Your hand!

First cut off the bottom seamed edge of the shirt. Next cut one inch strips across the bottom of the t-shirt. Cut your fabric strip in half. Do that again. Connect the two pieces.  Here is a very detailed instructional Video on how to connect two pieces of fabric yarn – you should be able to get the hang of it after watching the first two minutes of the video.

Now is where the fun begins!

Put your right hand out Michigan style with your palm up and your thumb facing the right. Take your fabric yarn and grab the end. Pull the end up from behind your hand and then between your pointer and your thumb.

Hand weaving Friendshiop bracelets

Weave the yarn through your fingers. It’s much easier to have a visual for the first steps of hand weaving.

Here is a picture of our younger daughter demonstrating:

How to wrap fabric yarn around fingers for weaving

In the above photo Ava let go of the tail end that she was holding with her thumb and it is hanging between her middle finger and her pointer – it worked out fine.

Next you take  your longer piece of fabric and wrap it around all three fingers – around your pinky, ring finger, and middle finger.  It is best described visually.  Here is Ava demonstrating what it looks like after it is wrapped around:

Fabric yarn wrapped for hand weaving

This is where the fun finger weaving begins!  Starting with your pinky finger, bend your pinky down holding on to the top piece of fabric yarn and take it under the lower piece wrapped around your finger.  Do the same thing with your ring finger and your middle finger.  Repeat rows.

After you have done about 4 or 5 rows this way, pull the tail end from the back so it looks like this:

pull the end of the weaving – looks like this when it is close to finished

The whole process from start to finish is best described by watching my YouTube video here:

So now you’ve hopefully been able to follow my YouTube tutorial on how to make chunky braided friendship bracelets.

Hope you enjoyed that – I pasted in a pic of my high school gal pals and I all sporting our friendship bracelets at the very end of the video tutorial.  Now I am back home in Cali just missing the good times we had together.  You can see Torch Lake in the background and the cute Michigan shaped teak chairs Debbie has in her cottage yard.  We had a super fun dinner and laughed to tears that night out!  Miss them all and can’t wait for our next girls trip!!

Well when I got home from my girls trip to Michigan, our younger daughter Ava and I took our dog Oscar to the groomers for a haircut.  He looked so cute when we brought him home that we just had to make him a braided collar.  It was Ava’s idea.  Here are a couple cute shots of her putting the collar on Oscar and how sweet he looked afterwards.

Our dog Oscar modelling his new hand weaved pup collar

Fun dressing up our cutie pie pup hand weaved doggy collar

Thanks for reading this post and I sure hope you try making your own hand weaved doggy collars and friendship bracelets soon! If you do please let me know how it went – I would love to hear. Subscribe to this blog for more inspiring ideas and tutorials of how to make well, nifty stuff 🙂 xx o -Bita

Oops!  Don’t forget kitty – Bluebell seems to like sporting her new kitty collar.

Our kitty Bluebell sporting hew new friendship collar, hand weaved by Ava

Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she wonderful?
Isn’t she precious?