T Shirt Quilt: Finale!

Winter holidays 2026 feel like the gift that kept on giving. Steve was working through, so the girls and I kept things pretty simple; hanging around the house, catching up with people, reading, crafting, cooking and eating. I did get some kind of sickness in the middle, but it was nothing terrible, and mostly just left me tired and head-achey. 

Inconceivably, I managed to finish not one, but two hefty work in progresses among all the other life and sickness that went on. I've already talked about Maria's Denim Quilt, which was an achievement in itself, but today I get to say that I also finished the T Shirt Quilt! 

This had been a long long time coming - from back in 2020 when I first started cutting up T Shirts, to earlier this year when I realised I was getting close to having enough to get moving on it all. I lay out the shirts in what looked like a balanced and evenly distributed way and got sewing them up into columns. There were a couple of things that needed padding out, but that was a fairly easy fix to do. 

When I finished, I noticed one of my columns was slightly too short - I needed one more T Shirt! The girls and I voted on which of Steve's still wearable shirts to sacrifice to the quilt. 54 shirts in all.

So difficult to get a full photo of this quilt, since it's huge!

With the quilt top finished, I turned to the problem of actually quilting the thing. When I first made the quilt that went on our bed, 15 years ago, I had zero actual quilting experience and honestly, did not know what I was doing. This kind of worked out for me though, because when I finished that quilt, I really didn't do anything more than baste the thing together. Which ment that I could actually take the whole thing apart fairly easily. 

It was dusty, but I got to re-use all the batting that was inside the original quilt. Maybe I still don't know what I'm doing, but it was still functional and seemed a huge waste to just chuck it. The new quilt was slightly larger, so I added some extra strips that I had been given from a neighbour who was getting rid of it a few years ago. Yay for using up stuff! 

For the back of the quilt, I pieced together some leftover fabric from Sophie's Quilt, and grabbed out a random bed sheet that the girls weren't using anymore. I love the quilt top so much I really didn't want to spend any money (or time thinking) on the back. It made way more sense to just use what we had. 

Actual quilting (the process of sewing together the top, batting and backing) is honestly such physical work. The quilt is heavy! There is a lot of juggling things, figuring out where to pull or guide the fabric through. I have started doing this outside on the deck. I would just set up Sally on the glass table we have out there, but that table wobbles and bounces like crazy when you sew on it, so I take the dinning table out and butt it up against the glass one. Then there is plenty of space for the quilt to lay on the tables and I don't have the movement. 

Wanting to keep the cool images from the shirts as intact as possible, I just quilted lines down the columns and then across the rows. I really like the look of it, and I would have added more, but by the end of five or six hours of quilting, you get a bit over it. 

Since I had taken apart the original Queen Quilt, I cut that old top into strips and used it to bind the edges. I love so much that the old quilt is part of the new one. Can not say how much I love that. Everything in this quilt is something that was used before or leftover from another project. That's not to say that it cost nothing. Hours and hours of time went into making this. Even just prepping the T Shirts for the top was likely eight hours, not to mention sewing it all together, and that was before the quilting and binding. 

Even though no one would likely pay the hundreds of dollars that this quilt is worth, there is some serious satisfaction, joy and comfort when I see this quilt on our bed. Time well spent. 

T Shirt Quilt: Phase 2

This is still very much a work in progress. Not sure if it's frustrating, or something I'm ok with. I can certainly see the goal though, and I don't feel it is too far off now. 

Back in 2020, after a wardrobe clean out that removed a number of Steve's humorous shirts from his drawer, I decided the best thing would be to save them for a quilt. Initially I had enough to just a single, couch quilt type thing, if I used some extra fabric to pad it out. I didn't love that idea (even though I'd spent a fair few hours on the cutting out of fabric I wouldn't end up using), so I just put it in a Work In Progress box in my sewing nook. 

Over the years, I added shirts to it as we wore out of them. Steve's, mine, even the girls. The box was getting quite full, so in May I pulled it down to do a stocktake of what I had collected. To my delight, I had actually been putting away more shirts than I remembered, and now had more than twice or three times as much as when I started. 

This made me pretty excited, because even though we had reclaimed our original quilt from Sophie (now that she had her own), it was looking pretty worn out; even ripped in a few places. I will likely salvage lots of it for repurposing, but I'm also looking forward to replacing it on our bed with a new quilt made with our fun shirts. 

I've put in the time to prep the stretchy shirt fabric with interfacing so it won't move around when I quilt it. It's also going to take a while to get the layout right, given I'll need to balance colours and themes (can't have too many positive dinosaurs or Disney references in one cluster now), but I'm actually really looking forward to it. 

Too bad I'm still in the midst of another WIP! Is it too much to hope that these school holidays will be super productive and I'll get both of these done? Probably.

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.