Not Your Grandma’s T-Shirt Quilt

I’ve been meaning to tackle a t-shirt quilt for a while now, so when Allison asked me if I’d take on a stack of tees from her husband and make them into a quilt, I readily agreed. I figured I’d make the standard style: cut out the logos to a specific size, then add sashing. Seemed simple enough…

But the tees she sent had all sorts of varying sizes of logos and it seemed so wrong to cut them all out the same size and lay them out in a grid.

So out went the old plan and in came the improvising. Ta-dah!

Some details to note:

All the fabrics, including the back and binding are knits. This was the real challenge, but proved fairly simple. All the t-shirts were backed with Pellon SF101 (following the directions on the package this time!) before any cutting was done.

Jersey knit binding was not what I intended to do, until I did it. Here’s how.

There were several t-shirts that were solid, so I used those only for piecing. Shirts with any logo were cut out with at least two inches on all sides, so I could fussy-cut later.

I added a grey jersey knit at the top and left border to ground it and add some of the asymmetry that I love.

It is backed with navy Cuddle® minky and was long-arm quilted by Karen at Cosmic Quilting in Laguna Hills, CA.

Custom t-shirt quilt crumpled to show soft texture

Thanks for trusting me to make your husband a t-shirt quilt, Allison. It was a joy to create.

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