Can you take the lint from your dryer and make clothing?
Can you take the lint from your dryer and make clothing?
I know its not quite that simple, I'd have to make thread first, and after I get enough, make clothing out of it. Could this actually be done? I can sew, but never made my own clothing nor have I ever made thread, so I don't know if it could actually be done or not. I'm 100% sure the time and effort would not be worth it, or money spent on stuff to produce the thread, etc. But looking at my lint garbage pale made me wonder.
You can’t spin thread from it since the fibers are too short.
But you can use lint for felting.
56As someone who spins and felts, the fibers in lint are too short for felting too. Both spinning and felting require the fibers be long enough to tangle and lint is the broken pieces of fibers that have fallen out of threads already. You can get it to stick together like felt but it won't ever be sturdy like a felt because the fibers can't get wrapped around one another or tangled up. Like trying to give dreadlocks to a guy with a buzz cut.
Some people use dryer felt to add color to felted things they have made but I think of lint like the crumbs at the bottom of the cereal box or chip bag.
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One use for lint is as a fire starter.
You can just use it as is and light it and it works great.
Or you can soak the lint with Vaseline, then store a small bunch of it into a sandwich Ziploc bag and keep it for emergencies or camping.
Because it's so good as a fire starter ... always check your dryer for excessive accumulation.
50Also blow out the duct. So many people don’t even know that’s a thing that needs done. Took me a decade until I learned that, and it was so clogged.
16It does work good, but always good to be aware of how much of your clothes are synthetic fibers. Burning that is like burning plastic. Not good for BBQing.
11One use for lint is as a fire starter.
General caution, this is true irrespective of your intentions.
Clean your dryer regularly.
8Shout-out to the GM of the Aaron's calling me an idiot that doesn't know how to operate a dryer when they sold me one out the door so clogged I'm amazed my house didn't light on fire. Swore up and down they quality checked everything, the 2 hours I spent with that machine open scraping the lint out suggests otherwise.
Yes, I'm still salty about it over a year later.
5🎶 Goodness gracious, lint starts a fire 🎶
4Started 3 fires in the last week with lint. Great stuff if your kindling is dry. For wet stuff I use homemade napalm (old unleaded + styrofoam).
2🎶 Goodness, gracious, lint starts a fire 🎶
1
Lint is made of very short fibers. Yarn is held together by friction and tangling between the fibers; if they're too short, it won't hold together. So if you tried to spin lint into a yarn, it would probably just break apart.
32I remember reading about someone who tried that once. He wasn't able to spin thread from the lint.
If I remember correctly, the fibers were too short and frayed to form into threads.
17I use mine as firestarter at barbecues- ot did, back when summer still had rain in my area (the only time of year when it gets nice enough to bbq), now there’s a yearly burn ban that spans the entire season
8Does burn ban apply to BBQ? I always assumed that's enclosed fire.
3In WA it did this year
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Dryer lint is basically microplastic if you have synthetic fibres
8It does make excellent fire starter material. Add wax to it and wadd it up. Candle wax, paraffin wax, whatever. The little lint wax wads are easy to light and burn for a while.
6Doesn't answer your question directly but those short lint fibers can be pushed into a toilet paper roll and made into firestarters that work at the campsite
5Kind of related but would it make for good insulation in a jacket?
4Well you got me curious:
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-make-clothes-out-of-dryer-lint
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