Fleece yarn is great for fluffy, chunky knitting and crochet projects. The following technique turns any big squares of cloth into fabric yarn balls, but this yarn tutorial is specifically geared for fleece.

I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner.  I have GIANT piles of leftover fleece.

Making Fleece Yarn

Find the Stretch

Pull your fleece pieces.  Figure out which direction of your fleece is the stretchy direction, then fold along the dotted line as shown below for really stretchy yarn.  Fold the opposite way for really sturdy fleece yarn.:

Grab the Shears

Using your favorite rotary blade(or scissors for a rustic look), cut your material starting from the fold in 1/2 inch ribbons.  Stop a 1/2 inch from the edge. (If you’re considering an arm knitting project, you will want to increase your yarn width.  Increase the distance between the strips and stop point from the edge by the same amount.)

Then, open it up and clip every other edge as in the diagram below.  You should end up with one long fabric strip. If you clip in the wrong spot, you get multiple strips.  Don’t worry if you make that mistake; just use the joining instructions found later on in this tutorial.

Trim the Turns

Next, trim the corners off of each turn, so you don’t have big, wacky chunks in your fleece yarn.  you may want to practice with a smaller scrap to find the right trim distance for your particular fabric.  Fleece is bad to overstretch in thin spots.:

Then, roll it up into a ball.

Joining to Make it Longer

If you have multiple pieces of fleece to join, put a TINY slit in end of yarn piece…much smaller than shown below. If you make the slit too large, the yarn gets too skinny when you pull it taut.

Next, thread strip 2 through the slit in strip 1 and pull its (2’s) tail through its own slit. (Like when your connecting elastic bands together.) Check out this post for a good picture of it.

Finally, get our your needles and knit or crochet with your own chunky fleece yarn!