My first EVER t-shirt quilt.

Woooweee, I’ve been a busy girl this past week! One of my mom’s poker buddy’s granddaughter just graduated high school and was having a hard time parting with all her childhood sports jersey’s and t-shirts that she no longer wore but still had a lot of memories that held sentimental value to her, so her mom thought to make it into a quilt for her to take off to college. Awww. Enter: me . I was propositioned to make this for her. My first one. EVER. I’ve done small baby quilts before and I feel I’ve learned new things with each one but I am by no means a seasoned “quilter”, and as my fellow sewers/crafters know, working with knit (aka, what t-shirts are made of) can pose many challenges because it stretches. But I like challenges so bring it. Queen sized??? Sure, why not.

Do you have any idea how BIG a queen size is? Bigger than my sewing table, that’s for darn sure. Then throw in batting that goes in between the quilt top and backing and we’re talking muscle building workout toting this thing around my work space, aka entire house. I seriously had to find bigger and bigger work areas to lay this puppy out. At one point I ended up in my kitchen (no worries, I did wash my floor first, I swear!) I had agreed to doing this for her and had the bag of t-shirts before I found out how big she intended it to be. In hind sight, I don’t think I would have had the cojones to say yes if I had known the size beforehand. All in all though, it went without a hitch (Thank you JEsus!) and I’m positively in LOVE with it.

Look at the size of this thing! I’m pretty sure it weighed a metric ton too (bonus points to anyone who knows which movie character is described as weighing “one metric ton”. I know grandpa Terry will get this right ).

Eli liked it

The girl’s mom said she liked the quilts with the borders around each shirt so that’s why I did the blue in between. She also said her daughter’s favorite colors were blue and red and that she liked tye dye so I bound the quilt using tye dyed looking fabric and backed it with red.

I originally thought I’d do the “tie” method to quilt this blanket since it was to be so big and I don’t have a professional quilting machine at my disposal (dang it! Any sewing shops wanna donate to a good cause?? ), which is a very typical method but honestly I’m not a huge fan of that look. I’m not sure why. But I feel it detracts from the overall beautiful quilt top you worked so hard to piece together, Here is a pic I took from the internet to give you an idea of what I mean:

See the blue tie? You place those regularly throughout the whole quilt which keeps the back layer, batting, and quilt top all sandwiched together. You would think those ties would get cut down to near invisible but they don’t. That’s how they’re “designed” to look. Bleh. I have my scissors in hand and reeally want to snip them through the computer screen .

So instead I decided to try and muscle this ginormous thing through my very clearly not designed for quilting sewing machine and hoped for the best. Gulp. I just sewed lines through the blue borders creating squares on the back—nothing fancy but in my opinion, an option I could be proud of putting my name on instead of doing the tie method above.

Here’s a pic of the back to show you what I mean:

I used a queen sized flat sheet so that I didn’t have to worry about piecing together the fabric for the backing and risk having an unsightly seam running down the center. It actually looked like a duvet cover when I finished which I found to be a pleasant surprise .

That stuff on the bottom was from sleeves of her left over t-shirts so I made a little label by embroidering on the “9”a little note from mom and dad:

Overall, I’m very excited with the way it turned out. It was really fun and challenging to have to figure it out ahead of time, come up with the correct math/measurements, and to not have to make multiple trips to the craft store. I literally had scraps of fabric left! Yay me .

Am I ready to start my next one? Not on your life! ha ha. I need a break . And my hubby would like to see me again seeing as how I was totally preoccupied making this thing any time Eli was napping or down for the night. Honey, I’m back!

Night all,

-Linds