This post is NOT a step by step guide to show you how to make a T-shirt quilt. I think there are enough tutorials floating around Pinterest on this already. A couple different sites I referenced when setting out to make our quilts: Source 1 / Source 2.
This post IS all about what worked for us when making these quilts. US being me and my mom, and QUILTS being Travis’s quilt of shirts he accumulated through go-kart racing, and my quilt of all the shirts I accumulated through my years as a high school cheerleader.
And excuse me if a lot of what I am saying here might be “duh” moments for advance quilters, but I am far from a quilter and a very ammeter sewer at that. From that statement, you can judge that this project is great for beginners. It’s an easy, but time consuming project.
Here is the arsenal of quilting tools that we used:
CHOOSING SHIRTS // Before I started any cutting, I laid the shirts out to decided which ones I was going to use. Travis had two big boxes filled with racing related shirts that didn’t even include all the shirts he had hanging in his closet. It helped narrowing it down so I wasn’t wasting any time cutting out shirts I wasn’t going to use.
CUTTING SHIRTS // Some shirts had graphics on the front and backs that I wanted to use. I started by roughly cutting all the shits at the side seams so that the front and backs were separated. Some shirts had logos or embellishments on the sleeves or just a tiny logo on the front; for these, I cut out the graphic and set it aside. All the large fabric squares are the same size on each of the quilts, but the dimensions used for my cheer quilt (12″ x 12″) are a lot smaller than the squares used for Travis’s quilt (15″ x 15″). For each quilt I determined my smallest shirt and set that as my size for the rest of the shirts. PREPPING THE SHIRTS // After I had all the shirts cut to the right size, I went through and ironed them all out. This helped when it came time to sewing, because after cutting up the shirts, the edges all started to curl up.
SEWING // Nothing magical or different in this department. We sewed all of the shirts in a columns together first and then attached each column to the next one. For the racing quilt we sewed three columns together and then the other three together. We sewed the small patches on before we sewed the two half’s together. This just made the fabric easy to handle as we were feeding it all through the sewing machine. PUTTING IT TOGETHER // We decided not to use interface like most of the tutorials suggested. We backed both quilts with fleece we got from Joanns. The racing quilt needed 6 yards of fleece, and the cheer quilt needed 3 yards of fleece. Before we sewed the back of the paw print fleece onto my cheer shirts, we sent it to our local embroidery shop to have them add my name, high school, and years cheered. For the racing quilt, we didn’t have anything added to the back, but we did have to cut the fleece in half horizontally and then sew it together vertically because it was such a wide quilt.
SMALL PATCHES // Remember those small logos I cut out? We used them like patches to cover corners that maybe didn’t match up evenly or just place over a spot of a shirt that seemed plain. To note, we sewed these on BEFORE we sewed the quilt to the fleece.
BUTTONS // Some of my cheer shirts originally had buttons on them and instead of getting rid of them, we saved them and sewed them onto the quilt using it to secure the quilt and fleece together and to keep it from shifting around. For the racing quilt, Travis’s racing shirts didn’t have buttons on them so I ordered some racing themed buttons off of Etsy to attach to his quilt to serve the same purpose as the buttons on the cheer quilt did. Depending on where the button would be sewed onto the front at, we used the color thread that matched up with the color of the fleece on the opposite side.
This is a great way to showcase a bunch of old t-shirts that have meaning to you. Instead of giving them to goodwill or packing them away in a box and forgetting about them, create a quilt so you will forever have these great memories laying around. Even though these blankets took us awhile to piece together, it was SO SO worth it in the end. We use these blankets on a daily basis (but check back in a couple months when they will be shoved in the closet because of the high summer temps!).
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