BIG Project - Part 1

I started something big.

t-shirt quilt!!!

Hopefully not too big, but we'll see. I have a lot of tshirts...a lot. If you ever went to high school or played a sport or went to college or ran in a race or went on vacation you probably have quite a few as well. I don't wear all of my tshirts (most of these just didn't fit anymore), but I just couldn't bring myself to put some of them in the Goodwill pile. I've wanted to use them to make a tshirt quilt for a while, but didn't want to pay $150-$200 for it. Since I haven't had any major sewing disasters lately I thought I was up to the challenge! : )

I've researched how to make one and loosely based my method on what I've read. Really the only problem I foresee running into is that I don't know how to quilt anything (just a minor problem, right? hah!). We'll see if that turns out to be a deal breaker. I thought I'd post instructions as I go because if I wait until the end I'll probably never get around to it and no one would want to read that long of a tutorial anyway.

First, you need a template. I cut mine out of a cardboard box. My squares are 14" x 14" and you will probably want to check some of your smaller shirts first to make sure this will fit between the sleeves. I ran into a couple shirts (size adult small or child large) that were a little smaller. I would've gone 12" x 12" but then the finished quilt wouldn't have been quite long enough for me. I always get annoyed when a blanket won't cover my shoulders and my feet.

I ended up making one side "Up" on my template because after the first two shirts I realized my template was about 1/8" taller than it was wide. This way everything should line up nicely. I would definitely suggest doing this on a hard surface - as in not on carpet like I did. I'm hoping this won't come back to haunt me, but I don't exactly have a good hard surface to trace/cut on.

Sharpie was my marking tool of choice for this operation. Trace around your template then cut your squares (or in my case almost square, but technically a rectangle because one side is 1/8" longer). Then you're done with phase 1. Yay! I lined up my pieces so I could see what it would look like (sigh, if only that magically made it finished). I still need one more shirt to fill the hole at the top. I had one picked out but changed my mind before I attacked with Sharpie and scissors.

Stay tuned for the rest of the project. I'll update as I go along. I'd like to have a pretty thorough tutorial at the end of all of this because I didn't find a very comprehensive one when I was looking around. Just don't hold your breath for the next post because I'm pretty sure the next step won't debut any time this week. I hope everybody had a great weekend!