I've long wished to be able to crochet, but have never seemed able to pick it up. I recall there was a trend years back, of making hooks from old toothbrush handles to use for making chunky rugs.

For garments, towels & socks past rescue, I have a ragbag, and simply throw away the rags after use. I've made yarn from t-shirts and used it for crafts projects with kids.

The kids made chunky bracelets

And we used the t-shirt sleeves and yarn to make little drawstring bags too

Depends on what it is. Like when I cleaned out the old tennants junk from the barn, there were bins and bags of clothes. Natural stuff went into the base of a new garden bed. Some of it went into archery butt. Some went into the trash. Some got set aside for work fabrics like using for frost cloth, shade cloth, or oil cloth for the property.

Out of more household.. towels and linens get used, then reused as rags, then reused some more. Natural stuff gets torn/shredded up and left out in various spots for fauna beddings. Sewing project scraps tend to get recycled into minatures use. Sometimes used in hair accessory making. Clothes that are nice get donated, not so nice ends up as garden clothes down to rags and into other. Some synthetics I've had to just toss over time.

I have a couple very nice rag rugs my mom made for me. I don't really need any more :)

I'd love to see some pictures of your rugs, Claudia. I really like the idea.

The national chain H & M--in regional malls---accepts any type of fabric to be sipped off somewhere and recycled. As a Thank You they hand out % off coupons.

If you are making rugs perhaps a pet shelter could use them.

If you are in a rural area natural materials can go in a fire pit.

Save the buttons and zippers if possible.

carolb, of course you can crochet. Your tshirt yarn is exactly what I make my rugs with.

bees..., i have used natural fibers to make berms for erosion control. I will take something like the leg of a pair of pants and fill it with bits of natural fibers and maybe throw in a bit of soil and maybe a touch of fertilizer or some fresh cut grass, what ever I have, but always fabric scraps. I usually cover it with some more soil .It has worked beautifully for where I used it, Some of the berms have been buried now for about 3 or 4 .years and they are solid.

You certainly have more uses for old fabrics than I do. Synthetics are not good for much resuse. Most of them dont even make good cleaning rags.

Rho, I am very skeptical about what H&M does with that stuff. I am skeptical enough to believe none of it.

I tried burning some things and it just attracted too much attention in my suburban neighborhood.

There is too much time and work put into making all that fabric yarn and crocheting the rugs to make it and it would just be used once and tossed into the landifll at an animal shelter.

I did save all manner of things from old clothes, such as zippers and webbing and fasteners and such from old bags. It got to be too much and I had to toss them. I just really have no need, but all of that good stuff just gets tossed with the garment or bag. What a waste. But I could not deal with all of it. There is just, simply, too much of everything!

Crochet and knitting are skills I've never been able to master - don't think I haven't tried 😏

I can embroider, sew and do macrame, tho 🙂

My sister in law is one who cant do those things either. She had tried but just cant. I think that a lot of her problem is that she is left handed and it is a right handed world.

It's hard for lefties. So many things are handed that we don't even notice, and of course it's harder to teach.

Good thing leftiness forces one into near ambidextrousness in our world (I feel like I'm just making up words now)--I can't teach my lefty kid to write neatly but he almost makes up for it by being a great typist (and pianist). I realized yesterday that even some of our spatulas are handed.

After speaking with several H & M employees I am sure the fabric is sent to a third world country where it is recycled and creates jobs for folks.

Animal shelters beg for used towels and rugs. No way would they treat those items as disposables after one use.

Ha - I do not have the excuse of being a lefty - at least in the handedness sense 😁

Rho, I would be wiling to bet that the shelters simply toss the used linens. It would be way too much to launder them. Sure that they get an awful lot of them donated.

If is some small and private organization, it might be different from the county run one.

I really dont share your optimistic view of what happens to the things that are donated back to HM in return for a coupon. These are old clothes, not fabric. And, if you do some reading and research on the subject you will see that then entire planet is awash with old clohthes that have very little use. Sorry. Rho, but I dont, for one minute, believe that sending anyone in the world the cast off trash and flash stuff of our fast fashion world is of benefit to anyone but the corporations bottom profit line. I dont believe one word of it is genuinely true. it is just "green washing" and so many big corporations are trying to make us believe that we can still consume these things with 50% less guilt and save the planet at the same time. There is just no way!

I hold on to old clothes for way too long. I have a lot of shirts from the 1990s, but also some from the 1970s, including one that has a print of the crowd from Woodstock. Someone in Cathedral City is offering this shirt for $2,000, but mine is in better condition - no rips and worn only a couple of times - and I was considering selling mine, since it no longer fits. I saw one for sale a few years ago that was in London, and they were asking $400 for it. I bought mine in 1970 from Neiman-Marcus, and it has a NM label.

In the 1970s in San Francisco, I used to buy old blue jeans at thrift stores (I had never really worn blue jeans in my youth), and I would take them apart (if they did not fit) by removing all seams, iron the pieces flat, and then cut them into random pieces to make fabric panels by layering the pieces as appliqués. I then triple seamed them with contrasting thread (pink or ochre), so that the raw edges could unravel and make a sort of fringe. Then I made new clothes with these fabric panels - pants, skirts, vests, jackets, etc and sold them. For vests, I would use the panels with hip pockets (I never removed hip pockets or watch pockets) for the front pieces so that there would be pockets in the front. I used a piece with the watch pocket in an upper part of the front, for an additional pockets.

These sold well, and today I do not have any of these left that I made. I didn't really like denim for myself - never have and still do not.

Lars, you sound so creative!

I dont care a lot to wear denim, either, usually. I have a couple of pairs that I have sewn that are loose pants of denim with generous pockets. But, jeans I dont care for, at all. I find them to be hot in the summer and cold in the winter. I havnt owned a pair of jeans for over 20 years., and that was just one pair.