T Shirt Quilt Phase One

This is something I started earlier in the year, and am no where near finishing. I had been going through the wardrobes, as you do, and sorting out the shirts that were getting too old for wear, stained or had holes appearing in them. Time for them to go. 

But some of these shirts were just so fun. We have great memories of wearing these shirts. Of the way that the girls slowly got the jokes on Steve's and would ask repeatedly for him to explain it to them so they could laugh over and over again. It seemed a shame to just throw them away. 

Of course, there was a sewing soloution available: why not take these well worn and comfy fun shirts and give them new life in a quilt? It's been ages since I made a quilt, and I recently aquired a walking foot to really level up my quilting game. It was time. 

So I carefully cut out the cool parts of the shirts and did lots of maths. Seriously, there is so much maths in sewing. Every shirt had a logo that was a different size, so after cutting them out as large as possible, grouping them, measuring, rearranging, cutting some down and then starting the whole process again, I was begining to see how a quilt of these random shirts might actually come together. 

In that above photo you can see how I'm starting to pull together the pieces into three coloums that kind of match in size. There was still some padding to add in and rearranging so the colours went better, but overall, I was liking where this was going. 

So much maths though. People really have no idea all the maths that you need when you are sewing. I work in inches when I'm sewing a quilt, because that's how I learnt to quilt. I sew with a quarter inch seam. So whatever I'm making is going to lose a half an inch in seams. 

Now, if everything is cut the same size, you have the same number of pieces in each row/coloum and they are all going to lose the same amount, that's fine. But if you are working with random sizes, and one row has more pieces, it also means it's going to have more seams and thus, lose more fabric in the long run. So it needs to start out longer to compensate. Complicated. 

I did cut out lots of padding bits of t-shirt fabric (from the backs of the shirts, and other random shirts that had prints on them, rather than a logo), but when I lay it all down on the floor, I didn't like it. I don't know if it was the mix of the extra bits, or the way it was laid out, but something just seemed wrong. 

I think another thing that has stopped me from going ahead with it is that some of the shirts that we are still currently wearing, are also really cool. Some of them would fit super well with this quilt. I don't really want to end up with two T-shirt quilts, so it's probabaly better to just wait for the current shirts to wear out a bit more so I can add them to the others and just make one mega quilt. 

So I've put aside the coloums and all the extra fabric that I spent four or five hours cutting out, and more hours sewing together and thinking about and doing maths for. They are sitting in a bag. One day, I suppose, I'll get around to finishing this quilt. 

But not today.