Don't Toss Old Blankets. Here Are 12 Ways To Repurpose Them In Your Home And Garden

Old blankets can be difficult to part with. Even if you don't form any kind of emotional attachment to them after a few thousand nights curled up with tea and a good book, it just seems wasteful to trash them. Thrift stores will take them if they're in great shape, but then, so would you. Worn, stained, or damaged blankets are often best deconstructed and given new life as something suitable, from a pet bed to a bath mat or something as unlikely as a concrete planter or as mundane as a pillow.

Reusing sheets is easy — they're essentially just big pieces of fabric. Blankets have more bulk and so get excluded from projects that require simple, thin fabric. The following undertakings make practical use of the characteristics of a good blanket and are usually small enough (or weird enough, in the case of the concrete planter) that you can work around any wear and tear.

Unsurprisingly, most of these projects require some amount of sewing, though a few don't. And most are about creating indoor items, since the last thing you need is a reason to wash an old blanket more often. Some are simple, some are complex, but all of them will save you from having to dump that big poofy trash bag in the bin, suspecting there was something you could have used it for.

Pets — at least, the real pets that aren't merely dependent captives — tend to want to sleep on our beds. Well, turning an old blanket into a pet bed is your opportunity to turn the tables and (sort of) give them what they want without your having to spend sleepless nights worrying that you might accidentally boot the cat down between the mattress and footboard. There are really no rules here, but for a successful cat bed, you might want to make it out of some other pet's favorite blanket. That's just how cats roll.

What could be more natural? That old blanket felt cozy, so why not keep it that way? Turning a blanket into a pillow really only requires some basic sewing moves and stuffing it with fiber fill that costs twice the price of a new throw pillow. (Hey, nobody ever said reuse would be free.) Don't sew? It's easy to fold a blanket into a faux pillow ... or why not try a knot pillow? If your dryer won't make one for you, you can pretend you're about to escape from captivity in a castle tower.

While we're not sewing, here's something weird and awesome: It is apparently possible to create a planter by carefully coating an old blanket in cement. Most of the examples we've seen of this require an undue amount of gullibility — not to mention a spare bathtub — but it turns out that real people can do it, too. This idea scales, so don't feel like you have to make one gigantic planter — make a bunch instead! Note the use of scrap wood to make the fabric folds in the video above ... that seems to be the key.

Sometimes your vintage chairs can be a little hard on your backside after a while. You've probably been sewing old blankets or dipping them in cement for a few hours, and the hardness of hardwood starts to become apparent to you. Never fear: If you can sit a little longer, you can repurpose a corner of that old blanket as a cushy seat complete with ties. The ties are apparently for when you run out of cement and need some other way to hold the pillow in place. Who knew?

It happens, at some point, to every dust mop. Perhaps it's gotten streaky, smells a bit off, or no longer seems able to even attract dust. Happens to the best of us. The good news is that dry mop heads are one of the few types that you can successfully and legally reupholster. After years of laundry, you probably know an old blanket that loves to attract dust and grime. Simply cut out a bit of it and fit it to the business end of your dust mop.

You didn't know coffee tables had runners, did you? We were going to tell you about stair runners, but you know, lawyers and whatnot. But it turns out that coffee tables also appreciate a good cloth, even one made from an old blanket. Whatever the purpose might be, it's pretty nifty looking. And any party guest who trips on a coffee table runner shouldn't have been up there in the first place.

Perhaps this isn't a universal truth, but anecdotal evidence has convinced us that any household with more than one person needs at least 37 bath mats if you ever want to step out of the shower onto something dry. Luckily, you can probably get an awful lot of bath mats out of an old blanket. Probably not 37, but you have to start somewhere. Try cross-stitching "Why not dry your feet first?" on one and see if you can get that number down to something manageable.

Quick, what's the difference (besides location) between a bath mat and a rug? Well, at a minimum, a bath mat should generally be clean. If a rug is always clean, it's because some other rug did the dirty work before you got to the clean one. The moral of the story is that you need more rugs, and since you also have too many blankets, why not have them join forces? By the way, you can safely refer to a bath mat as a bathroom rug, so long as it's sufficiently cozy.

Quick, what's the difference between a pillow and a neck pillow? The latter is shaped like a dog bone or the letter "C" ... quite possibly the only useful thing the letter "C" has ever done. It also tends to be used vertically, which isn't something you can always say about bedding. What's that? Neck pillows aren't bedding? Well, they are now, because you're about to make one out of an old blanket. Someone suggested improvising a neck pillow by wrapping a book with a sweater, but making a book out of an old blanket seems like entirely too much work.

To misquote Paul Westerberg: "Bring your own lampshade, somewhere there's a hideous old lampshade that could have a second life as a plant pot cover." Or you could make a new one. Apparently, all you have to do is trace your lampshade, make a sewing pattern of it, sew it, and then hot glue it into submission. Maybe don't use a 100-watt incandescent bulb in that lamp, just in case it melts the glue and causes your salvaged bit of blanket to slip off onto the end table. Is that even possible? We can't prove it's not.

Every house needs a place to stick shopping lists, chore breakdowns, and educational decrees. For a while it was fashionable to cover a bit of cardboard with an old blanket and wrap ribbons around it to hold your precious photos of Cabo in place. But since no one even knows what a physical photo is anymore, it's okay to stick pins and thumbtacks in things and post them so that everyone knows what the High Inquisitor is up to these days. Or, you know, that someone should buy some milk.

Did you know that the word "upholstery" comes from the Middle English version of "upholder," which indicated one's role in upholding the integrity of furniture, possibly by stapling an old bedspread onto it? The first part of that is true, and the second part is about to become even truer because this project is about recovering a footstool — that most trod-upon of all the stools — by doing this very thing. It's as easy as reupholstering a chair: You don't even have to unholster the old upholstery to reupholster it with blanket upholstery.