T-Shirt Quilt

I'm excited to finally post pictures of my latest project. I started this quilt in November, and finally finished it this week. It's been one of those projects that kept getting put on the back burner. Last fall, I decided that I had too many camp t-shirts. I never wear my old camp shirts, except to sleep in or to the gym. My collection of old shirts was clogging up the closet, and exploding out of the drawers. I couldn't bare to part with my t-shirts, too many good memories - meeting my husband, teaching campers to ride horses, spending time singing at camp outposts and watching my campers come forward to accept Christ as the savior and friend. So instead, I opted to cut up my old shirts and create this beautiful quilt.

As a beginner seamstress, I wasn't sure where to start. I turned to pintrest for help. I found several t-shirt quilt tutorials tutorial #1, tutorial #2. And now after several months, and a much wiser me on quilting I'm thrilled to show off the results. I used shirts from 2003 through 2013.

Before I started cutting out the squares, I made a template with cardboard. This ensured that the squares were approximately even. I decided to sew each patch to the back of an old black twin/full bed sheet. In hindsight, this was a mistake and made it difficult to use the sewing machine later on and created bunches on the corners of the patches. 

 I added black fleece to the back of the quilt and sewed around the edges using a sewing machine. This gave the quilt a nice finished boarder and soft backside. To hide my mistakes, I choose to add the purple fabric around each patch. I think it really added to the quilt and it covered up the bunched corners. Lastly, I sewed by hand a blanket stitch around the edges of the patches. Below is a close up of a finished patch with the blanket stitch.

Lucas was such a great helper. He loved walking on the colorful patches, pulling out the sewing pins and pointing at the words PSR and saying Dada.