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This was a commission quilt that was gifted to Matthew Flanigan, President & CEO of Greater Rochester Habitat for Humanity by his staff to commemorate his 10 years of service to the organization.
Because it was presented at the annual Hearts & Hammers Volunteer Recognition event, I quilted it with hearts and hammers. It came out too puffy for my tastes because I used Quilter’s Dream Puff batting. I will try to remember to use a flatter batting in the future for t-shirt quilts. Fabrics: t-shirts and 100% cottons Batting: Quilters Dream Puff Threads: 50 wt. WonderFil Tutti-Frutti (variegated) with 50wt Aurifil in bobbin
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My sibkid, Gabe, was a runner in high school. This quilt is made from their collection of t-shirts from all their winning events - an impressive array.
This is the first time I've tried using a fleece backing (in place of batting and cotton backing). I love how soft and cuddly it is, but I didn't like working with it and none of the quilting shows on the back. I don't think I'll use fleece again. When my brother-in-law, John, turned 70 this October I asked if he would like a quilt for his birthday - perhaps a t-shirt quilt like I'd made for his brother, my husband. He jumped at the offer and delivered his selected t-shirts to David during their boys' weekend at Massawepie in November. I could find nothing in my stash that coordinated well with the t-shirts, so I did a bit of shopping. I selected the neutral tan/grey for the sashing and purchased six or seven options for the outer borders. When John & Alice were here for Thanksgiving, they helped select the border I used. The back is cotton flannel. I was hoping to emulate David's t-shirt quilt that has a grey sweatshirt material as batting and backing. I didn't think just the flannel would be enough, so I added a wool batting. It made for a VERY warm and cozy quilt. I hope John won't find it TOO warm! It also made for a much puffier quilt than David's, which made the quilting stand out more than I would have liked for this type of quilt. In certain lighting, like in the photo below, the quilting makes the text hard to read on some of the shirts.  Fabric: Cotton T-shirts, woven cotton (sashing & border), cotton flannel (backing)
Batting: Hobbs Wool Thread: Aurifil 50wt cotton, Superior Threads Monopoly, miscellaneous 50wt cotton and cotton/poly threads  This is the first t-shirt quilt I've ever made. After offering to make it for my husband, I was kind of dreading the project after hearing comments from other quilters who have made them. However, it was surprisingly fun.
First was the challenge of using each shirt to its best advantage. I measured and re-measured every shirt's design area, making lists and notes. Then I grouped design areas of similar widths together. Next, I came up with an inspired idea to use Excel to lay out the quilt. I sized the rows and columns in the spreadsheet to the same dimension so I had a grid of squares. I decided to have each cell represent 1" in the finished quilt. Then I started filling groups of cells with color to approximate the design area from each shirt. For example, I might have an area 13 columns wide and 10 rows deep colored yellow to represent the Maryland Marathon block. I had already spent time looking at other t-shirt quilts on Pinterest, so I knew I wanted to separate all the blocks with sashing. I decided to make that 1" wide, so I left a single row and column of cells blank around each color block in my layout. I went through many iterations of the layout and had to add and subtract t-shirts to get it all to work, but I love the way it all fits together in the end. Next it was time to start cutting up t-shirts. I was worried about piecing the knit fabrics together and knew that I would need some kind of stabilizer. Many thanks to my local quilt shop, Sew Creative, who recommended a knit fusible stabilizer that worked like a charm. It left the shirts with a little bit of give, but made them MUCH easier to work with. Since there was a little more give in one dimension than the other, I was careful to always have the stabilizer running the same way on each block. I cut it about an inch larger in each dimension than the design area. After cutting off the shirt's sleeves, collar and hem, and slitting the side seams to have a flat piece, I positioned the stabilizer (using a lightbox, when needed) and fused it down. Several shirts had some bad stains, so I ended up cutting around the design area and appliqueing it to a another unstained piece of the same shirt to have something looking nice. The sashing and border fabrics are 100% cotton quilting fabrics. The back is made from two sweatshirt-type fleece blankets that we received as thank you gifts at a recent Boy Scout fundraiser. There was no need to use batting because of the fleece. Marking and sewing that border was actually the most difficult part of the project. I sewed one whole side in a much more intricate interlaced version of this design that required lots of stopping and starting and marking of every line to be stitched. I just could not make it look good with all the stops and starts and things not quite meeting between the three colors. So, I spent about twice a long ripping that out as the stitching had taken before starting over with the design you see now. I also ran into problems turning the corner with this design. I made a mistake somewhere along the way that resulted in two corners being very different than the other two corners. Oh well! |
