T-Shirt Quilt

I posted on Facebook asking for quilt ideas.  A friend of mine asked if I could make a quilt out of all of her old t-shirts.  She had just gathered them to take them to the thrift store, but thought that this would be a much better idea.  She wouldn't have to get rid of all her favourite shirts!

I accepted the challenge, as I know that t-shirt fabric is not the most fun material to work with.  But it would be an adventure.  My favourite part is always the designing.  So I sketched out a plan.

With only 10 shirts to work with, I had to come up with a pattern to make it bigger than a baby blanket.  PINTEREST! I found so many beautiful t-shirt quilts.  Here are some of the ones I really liked:

I think you can see which one I took my inspiration from the most.  I did not, however, choose to use other material for the accents and borders.  I wanted to use as much of the t-shirts as possible so there was as little waste as possible.  

And so it began! The most difficult part of this project was also the most forgiving.  The thing about jersey fabric (as t-shirts are most often made of) is that they have a lot of stretch, a lot of drape to them.  The most taxing thing I found was that they rolled up on the edges.  It wasn't always easy to square up the fabric. Since it stretches, it gets skewed easily.  I mainly just tried to lay it flat with no wrinkles in a way that it was relaxed with no tension on it.

The fact that it stretched also meant that if I was a tad off in managing to get it square, it would still work.  If I found that over a length of two edges to be sewn together, they were off by about a quarter inch.  The shorter one could just be stretched ever so slightly to end up matching in the whole grand scheme of the quilt.

(The back)

I had a lot of fun with this project, although I feel like it has rather taken over getting anything else done with Flouster.  I've been falling behind on blogs. I haven't made anything else since I started this except for helping a friend make a Velma costume for her little girl's skating recital.  (Which she did fabulous at! I got to go and watch.)  I haven't even posted all the items that I already have up on the Etsy website.  I have, despite all this, been getting more hits on my Etsy page, though I highly credit adding custom engraved dog tags to my store for that... ...oddly enough.

I digress, after 133 pieces and approximately 55 hours of work, the t-shirt quilt is now finished.  It is a good snuggle-up-on-the-couch size at 56"x64" and is loved by my friend, whom I made it for.

Check out my latest treasury, T-shirts say a lot about you,on Etsy

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