I realize this is not a new idea.
And frankly, Twilight ruined it for all of us that were already saving t-shirts and now it just looks like we copied.
But, copying is ok when it’s a really fun idea and you give credit to the source.
My source was the nurse at our girls camp who had a fantastic quilt made from all of her camp t-shirts.
Once I saw her quilt, I knew that I would be hoarding my children’s t-shirts from now until the end of time.

You know by now that Ashleigh is a labeled, straight, clean lines, organized kind of girl. I am the kind of girl that gave up on clean lines long ago and sometimes too much symmetrical makes me nauseous. So I knew my t-shirt quilt would not be made of even sized pieces. I’m happy with the way it turned out but the process of lining things up also made me nauseous. And mad. I was already a little over-emotional looking at my daughter’s whole life summed up in t-shirts and realizing she’s graduating and leaving for college. So, it was a little rough there for a bit.

I cut the t-shirts up with a mat and rotary cutter leaving plenty of space around the design of the t-shirt. I experimented with placement and then started sewing. I did have to make some alterations to the placement as I went. I used some sentimental fabric as “filler” for when there was an awkward space like fabric from her lime green satin bedding, a swatch from the skirt she made for the pioneer trek, and ballerina fabric. I used her old jeans to make a border around the outside. I used purple (her favorite color) flannel on the back and bound the quilt in zebra print, (a long term obsession).

To quilt it, I used the stitch in the ditch method and sewed around each t-shirt. When I finished the quilt I had some, shall we say, imperfections. T-shirts stretch. Lets just leave it at that. So, I added a few other patches over some particularly bad seams like a zebra fabric heart, a pocket from her jeans and a patch on which I stitched her nickname. I’m still looking for a few golf ball appliques that I can also include.

I didn’t set out to make it a certain size but I did want it on the big side. There’s nothing worse than snuggling up with a blanket and getting a cold draft on your bootie. So it’s big, soft, and yummy. The quilt is far from perfect, in fact, you can never enlarge that picture or come to my house to see it in person. But, I only made it to show lots of love to one of my favorite people. And, when she’s at college (sniff!!) she will know that quilt is a long distance hug from me, imperfections and all! 🙂