T-Shirt Quilt

This spring I was commissioned by a coworker to make a t-shirt quilt for her son.  I was handed a box of sports jerseys from his childhood.  We picked out the border fabrics together.  It was really cool to be able to give life to these old shirts!    

Front

Back

I made the quilt double sided so that I could use all of the shirts.  I needed to be sure that the numbers from the back of the jerseys were used in the quilt.  So I made the borders large enough so that I could sew the numbers right into the borders.

The worst part about making this type of quilt was ironing fusible on the back of the t-shirt material.  Fusible makes it easier to cut and sew with materials that are regularly stretchy.  That was the most time consuming part of the project, but I'm glad I did it because it made the rest of the project so easy.

I finished it by tying it with embroidery floss.  When I was designing the quilt I made sure to pair up shirts of similar colors on the front and back.  In the end I was able to use the same color embroidery floss to tie together the quilt without having the color of the floss show up too much.

Given that it was relatively straight forward to put together and made for such a nice final product, I would totally do this again. (And recommend it for someone looking to make a special keepsake.)