I’ve read lately about where donated clothes end up and it didn’t leave me with warm and fuzzies. I still save up clothes for donations to Goodwill, but I’m also a lot more open to other ways to upcycle them. Most recently, I’ve been attacking cotton button down dress shirts. From what I can see, I have three, easy things I can create from them:

  • The back of a men’s dress shirt makes a pretty decent sized cloth napkin. For folks like me who use a cloth napkin with every packed lunch and dinner at home, this is a way that favorite clothing can keep making appearances.
  • The sleeves of shorts make great scrap fabric. I used a bunch recently to create a baby blanket for Mart Girl. The end result is a little amateur but really, I am SO PROUD of the results that I don’t care. Below are some pictures of my pattern, states and both sides of the finished piece.

I salvaged as many buttons as possible for use in future projects and in the end, my only waste was the collar and a few scraps of fabric that were just too small to use for anything.

This post originally appeared on Kate’s Point of View. © Kate. All rights reserved.