The Completed Quilt

I have worker for some time on this fabulous t-shirt quilt. This was a really large project, let's face it over years you can come up with all types of really neat t-shirts that you no longer wear but just hate to loose because they each have great memories attached. I was given free rein on this project. I asked for some color choices so I would have something that the person would like. Just take a look...

It is pretty time consuming to put this type of quilt together. I choose the sew as you go method because of the weight of the quilt. Anytime I have a big quilt I like to work on it in sections.

As I have said in the past...I really wish I had all the boy's shirts from their school days. This would really be a fun way to put all of those shirts together to show them off. 

I have not shared this with Claire yet, but I'm hoping she loves it.

Memory T-Shirt Quilt

I have had such a good time working out the details of this particular quilt. I can't wait to see how it looks once I've completed it. A friend brought me a huge bag of T-Shirts and said for me to "make it any way I thought it would look good". I started cutting the quilt after Christmas.

First I had to find a fabric that went with the variety of T-shirt colors. It's important that the fabric compliments the shirts, you don't want the fabric to be the focus when you look at the quilt. In reading up on the best way to prepare shirts, one recommendation was to wash and dry all shirts and lay them out so they do not need to be ironed. This method really worked well because there were so many of them. I actually washed them in 5 loads so they had plenty of room to tumble dry and fluff out. Then I carefully cut all of the shirts to 12 1/2 inch blocks, except for the few shirts that were to big for that. I took the shirt pockets and cut them so that 4 of these squares would make a 12 1/2 inch block. I stitched the pockets closed so that pockets would snag fingers and toes to damage the pocket blocks once they were made.

Because memories are so precious, A good bit of my time working on this quilt was in the cutting of the blocks. There was also a fair amount of time in the layout of the blocks. For me it is important to get the layout just right.

Do you have any idea of the way you can lay out a T-shirt quilt with a lot of blocks. 

Now I have been stitching away at the blocks. 

I am avoiding working on other quilts until this one is complete. I can't wait to see this one through.

Here is some of the work in progress.

I will continue the updates on this one.