Adventures in T-Shirt Quilt Making

Happy Tuesday all! Today I am going to share my adventures in T-shirt quilt making!

It all started when one of my friends from high school contacted me about making a t-shirt quilt out of her husband's high school sport shirts. I had never made a t-shirt quilt before, but she had saw my craftiness through me sharing my blog posts to Facebook, and thought that I could give it a go. I decided to give a try, we met up and exchanged the shirts and material. How hard could it be, right?

A little background: I made two quilts a few Christmases ago for some friends and when I told the lady at the quilting store that I planned making two quilts by Christmas (this was October when I bought the material), she laughed at me. Well nyeahhh lady, I did end up finishing both before Christmas (maybe one was being finished about an hour before it was supposed to be given...) but I felt a bit burnt out on quilting and said I'd never do it again. Fast forward to today... ;) I wanted to help out a friend and do it for her much cheaper than other places that we saw, so I decided to do one more. :)

I told Mama LOC that this was my last quilt... and she said that it won't be. And she's probably right. :) We'll see. ha!


Back to our adventure!

First, each shirt had to be cut out. We used a total of 12 shirts, and tried to cut as much as possible from each shirt. You can see in the top right that I was trying to figure out how a thick panel of plaid was going to look between each shirt.

My friend picked out some neat yellow and black plaid flannel to go between each shirt. Plaid is a little harder to use as it can be hard to cut straight and sew straight - a little stray sewing can be very obvious, but if you can follow the lines of the plaid, it will be easier.

I sewed each horizontal panel of shirts first and laid them in order. A quick tip - take a picture like the first picture in this blog to help you know which shirt comes next! It's an easy reference to flip back to.

The one thing you need when working on a quilt this size? Room to work! I am thankful for my craft room and my foyer for things like this - and for Mr. LOC and his patience with the quilt on his foyer floor! <3 Here I am setting each panel into the black dividing horizontal strips. Each shirt panel will get sewn to these strips to create the top!

Black strips are in place!

This pic is a little fast forward in the process - at this point, I am sewing the quilt together - I have cut down the black flannel backing, added a layer of quilt batting, and I have hand tied the quilt together in strategic spots so that the quilt back, batting and top are tied together so they don't move. I have also basted the quilt with large stitches so that as I'm sewing my binding around the quilt, nothing moves around on me. Those large stitches come out. :) This also shows how much quilt there really is as only a little part of it is under the sewing foot at this time!

Fast forward even more...

And we're done! For some reason, that bit of flannel looks really crooked in this picture, it's not crooked like that in real life (or even if it is, it is certainly not as obvious in real life!)

It measured almost as large as a twin size bed! And the flannel she chose was perfect for this sort of thing. It is a very heavy quilt and I know it'll be great for snuggling. :)

Overall, it was a fun project and a great learning experience. Thank you to my friend for coming to me with this project, I hope you enjoy your new blanket! :) Also thank you to Mama LOC for helping me cut down the shirts, figure out the measurements multiple times, and generally being my cheerleader to keep going! ;) Also thank you to our other pair of friends who gave me a fantastic rotary cutter, board and quilting ruler for Christmas! It was a life saver.

And thank you for following along! :) Hope you enjoyed reading about my little quilting adventure.