T-shirt quilt - finished!

If I had more energy, I'd have an artful shot of it draped around me or something, but I'm lazy, and our chip wall paper (as a backdrop) isn't very attractive.

So here it is, hurrah! All my favourite t-shirts of yore, carefully stowed for years and finally brought out to shine all together.



You might notice that I've arranged the blocks in a sort of checker(draughts)board between white/light and black/deep coloured tees. I think it came out subtly enough, anyways I am pleased with the arrangement.

I knew I was either going to use fleece as the sole backing or the batting, as my quilt would be tied every 16 inches - I don't think any normal batting would stand up to that! Of course, I forgot to actually measure said quilt and said fleece, so it wasn't *quite* as wide as the quilt. Nevermind, I sorted it out with the binding.



All in all, it's lovely and cozy and exactly the size of the top of a UK King/US Queen size bed, pretty impressive! The sashing fabric is shot cotton from the Rowan Kaffe Fassett line, and the binding is something random which was cheaper and happened to match. ;) If you'd like to know the meaning behind all the tees, click on this picture to take you to the flickr page, with notes!

Second Most Popular

I've been been slowly working away on the t-shirt quilt. My previous post about the quilt is the second most popular on this blog after the one about flapjacks. Kinda makes me wonder why two of my non-knitting posts are the most popular? I won't dwell on it... really.

So, I've been slogging away on my quilt, which has involved attempting to measure and cut the t-shirts into reasonably rectangular pieces using only a plain ruler and a fabric pencil.

And dealing with t-shirts which, once they'd had their interfacing ironed on, weren't quite square.



Thankfully, a friend lent me a rotary cutter, self-healing mat, and see-through ruler. I cut all my t-shirt rectangles out at her house, then painstakingly calculated the sashing so that each square would be 16" - plus seam allowances. See, usually when you make a t-shirt quilt you cut all the t-shirts the same size. I have been randomly cutting out t-shirt fronts for the past six years without regard to their size, so I had a bit of a pickle to deal with.



I cut and cut and cut. Booring. And finally, last week, I began to sew.



good



ungood

*rip rip rip*

Today I ran out of thread, but I got this far:



And all the squares are sashed. Time to start thinking about backing fabric...

Planning a T-shirt Quilt

Man, if planning a t-shirt quilt is this difficult, I shudder to think of the planning involved in a normal quilt. But nevermind that, I have selected my blocks and laid them out and such and tried not to be swept away by memories.



Now I need to buy scads of interfacing and some sashing and backing fabric...

see also:

Cutting and Sashing
The Finished Quilt