Sarah's T-Shirt Quilt

Back in the spring, when we were home for weeks and weeks on end, and Ryan was traveling I dug out some of his Purdue rowing t-shirts that his parents, and then us, had been hoarding (for what, almost 20 years now?!?  Good god....) to try and attempt my first ever t-shirt quilt.  I shared that quilt on the blog back in May.  You can read about it here.  I figured, what the heck....and, I learned a lot in doing that project.  It taught me some quilting techniques I'd not used before.

Fast forward a few months into the summer and Sarah asked me if I could make a similar quilt out of her t-shirts from high school.  Why not!?  Nothing else to do!  And, once again, I learned a ton!  First off, I almost always use a pattern that was professionally written.  I can follow directions pretty well...I'm not sure I can just wing a quilt.  But, I knew I'd need to come up with my own layout for this one.  And, I knew I'd need to figure out how to work with all different sized blocks.  A few YouTube videos later, I had graphing paper, a list of block sizes, crayons, glue and scissors and I got to work.  It was actually really fun to make this little mock up!  And, it helped tremendously.  What's funny is that it took me probably 4 or 5 hours just to get to this point.  I hadn't cut a single piece of fabric yet...but I had a plan!  And that's the important part.  

Thanks to the magic of blogging about things in the past, I can quickly flip from pictures of a grid layout, to the finished quilt.  I always feel like the process in between is a little messy, a lot of work, and not very fun to photograph.  Plus, that's what we all really want to see, right?  The finished (or almost finished) product.  Not bad, right!?

Before sending it to the quilter I added a grey boarder to help frame it out a little and I packed it up and sent it out to my quilter right after Thanksgiving.  I was hoping she could have it back to me in time for me to bind it and get it to Aunt Corda before Christmas.  We backed the quilt in minky - my first time using it!  I was really excited to try it out but honestly, I'm not sure I'd use it again.  Maybe it was the minky I bought, but it wasn't as soft as I expected it to be. We quilted it in a pattern called Bauhuas and used a light grey thread.