T-shirt quilt

This is my friend Laura and she is super adorable. She recently got a sewing machine and wanted to make her mom a t-shirt quilt for her mom for Christmas. She turned to me for help.

I had always wanted to do a t-shirt but never got the chance to. I was going to make one for my friend Caitie out if her fiance's crazy collection of concert t-shirts. Matt however could not part with the shirts that I think are in a trash bag in his closet ( being put to good use). So I had a plan mapped out for the quilt to be constructed, but wasn't able to use it until Laura asked me for help.

Laura recently finished school and has a new found love of craft. I was very honored when she asked me for help making the quilt for her Mom. Laura's Mom is an adorable hippie lady with a fondness for the boss, Bruce Springstein. Laura explained that her mom has all of these shirts and hardly wears all of them. So Laura decided they would be put to better use being repurposed as a quilt!

I've done projects like this before, but on a smaller scale. Here is what we did to make it work. First we took an inventory of all of the shirts we had to work with. Since both sides of the shirts were visually interesting we wanted to use them. We made a pattern (a big rectangle) and we traced and cut all of the shirts from this pattern. There were a few shirts that were small tank tops that wouldn't work with the pattern, so luckily there was enough to make an entire row of a smaller of them. Laura placed it in the middle and it looks great. After all of the pieces were cut out, we ironed on some interfacing to make the shirts sturdy. We then figured out how it was going to be organized. Laura stitched all of the rows together then sewed all the rows together. Think of it like one big puzzle piece. Then I helped Laura bring it all together and sewed the quilt front with the queen size sheet. Some quilting batting was in between. And it came out looking fantastic! I am so proud of Laura!

The completed quilt!