Braiding Jump Ropes

I want to show you something I helped with last week, that I thought was pretty cool.
Our church does a lot with the Christmas Boxes for Samaritans purse. These are shoe boxes packed as full as possible with little gifts for kids overseas.  We have people that work on little projects throughout the year so when it's time to pack the boxes, we have some fun things to put in them.
Last week we made jump ropes!

Here's some of the group in the workroom at our church.

A thrift store near us saves t-shirts that they can't sell because they are stained or torn.  These guys were cutting strips of fabric off them.

The fabric strips are gathered into like colors.  It takes 12 strips of fabric to make one jump rope.  One person was taking the strips and putting them into bags; 3 colors and each color had 4 strips to equal the 12 strips needed.

Here they are stretching the strips and then braiding them.

A finished jump rope!  They are longer than this one looks, I had some bunched up in my hand.

Last, they are folded tightly and tied with a cute little tag that shows this is a jump rope.

Isn't this a great way to use old t-shirts that otherwise would be thrown away?  On this day we worked for 2 hours and finished 47 jump ropes and have 60 all set to be braided.