T-Shirt Quilt Challenge

I met with a new customer a couple months ago that provided me with a challenge. I was given 7 shirts and asked to make a t-shirt quilt for his wife. When asked what her style/colors were…I was given modern and neutral. Normally a queen size quilt takes 25-30 shirts, if arranged in a standard t-shirt quilt pattern. How was I going to fill in all that extra space?

I began my pattern hunt…google “modern quilt pattern”. I found a couple I liked and one specifically that I decided to modify to make it work. I didn’t have any graph paper on hand (it was needed to sketch it out to get fabric quantity needed)…so again I googled “1/8” graph paper, found it and printed it out. It worked perfectly. Google is a fantastic tool. I then hit up the local quilt shop to find my fabrics. Now if you have ever made a t-shirt quilt, you know that you are working with lots of colors and to find something that works well with all of them can be a challenge in and of itself. In this set I had pink, maroon, gold, green, black and brown shirts to work with and I had to stay in the neutral colors.

This is what I ended up with.

 

custom long arm quilting sacramento

It finished at a long queen, more like a queen in width and king in length. t-shirt quilt sacramento

The pattern at first looked like it would be a pain to put together, but it went very smoothly. I labeled my strip lengths as I cut them out. Then marked out my rows on the sketch and pulled each needed piece as I was working on that row.  sacramento t-shirt quilter

As for the quilting, the peach was filled with a swirl design from edge to edge. The shirts were stippled around the printed design to highlight the shirt. The cream was left empty to create another dimension.

custom long arm quilting

I am pleased with how it all turned out. Sometimes there is a little bit of trepidation, did I choose the right fabrics, layout, quilting fabric, thread…and I definitely second guessed myself a couple times on this one, but the fear proved unfounded. The quilt finished beautifully and is now home with it’s owner.swirl quilting pattern


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