Hot Glue Friday!

There is actually no hot glue involved in this post. But I thought I might try occasionally posting a super-easy 5-minute craft every so often. And "Hot Glue Friday" sounded more impressive than "Cut Up An Old T-Shirt Friday".

This craft--for an easy, no-sew infinity scarf--came to my attention courtesy of my youngest sister, who saw someone do it on Rachael Ray. This brings up an important point. I have never in my life completed a craft that I designed from scratch myself. I'm good at figuring out how to do things, but only after someone else has shown me a picture of it. So any craft I share here will come, at least in the idea, from someplace else and I'll try to give credit where it's due. In this case, if you go to the Rachael Ray website and search around, I'm sure you'll find a better set of instructions than you're going to get from me. But here's what I did anyway.

You will need:

An old T-shirt or tank top (the kind with no side seams are best, but use whatever you have on hand)
A pair of sharp scissors

Begin by laying your t-shirt out flat, as I have done here. Prepare yourself mentally to cut into it. Breathe.

Cut straight across the shirt, from armpit to armpit. If your shirt has a logo on the chest, as mine does, make sure to cut below it. Because this is a shirt I got from volunteering, I kept the logo to sew onto a tote bag I have where I stick all my badges and appliques from other volunteer stuff I've done. The rest of the top part of this shirt will be cut up and used to clean the bathroom. Waste not, want not.

Leaving the hemmed edge alone, start cutting both layers of the cut edge to make a fringe. I cut my strips 3" long and 1cm wide. You can cut your fringe all the way across or leave about 4 inches uncut at one end to hang at the back of your neck if you prefer not to have fringe there.

Here is what you will end up with.

And this is what it'll look like when you hang it around your neck.

Not being a huge fan of fringe, I was interested to see if this would work without the step of cutting the strips. All I had to cut up was a smaller tank top:

As you can see, it looks fine without fringe, so feel free to skip that if you're a no-frills type. You may also notice that this scarf is much shorter than the other one. That's because this was a form-fitting tank top. The width of the shirt definitely makes a difference in what kind of scarf you end up with, so that's something to take into consideration. This top also had side seams, so there's a bit of playing around with it to get it to look best once it's on. But no big deal.

And there you have it! No sewing, no skills required, and about 5 minutes of work, if that!

Go forth and be crafty!