A t-shirt quilt for dad…

This winter, Dad dropped off a bag of shirts, and asked for a t-shirt quilt. I had been asking him to give me shirts to do this with for a while now, and I had thought he’d do it with the vast amounts of Hard Rock Cafe shirts I have bought him over the years from all of my travels. Instead he surprised me with a bag of Harley Davidson t shirts! After deciding this was going to be his Father’s Day present, these shirts sat in the bag until I was ready to cut them up.

The only other t shirt quilt I made was done “Quilt as you go” in strips. That was so easy to manage under my machine I decided that was how I would tackle this one.

The first thing to do was to cut the fronts and backs out, and separate them into piles based on the width of the graphics. I ended up with a pile of 15 inches wide shirts, a 13 inches wide pile, and a 11 inch wide pile. There were also three “pocket” emblems that I just included where there were fewer shirts.

There were enough shirts in the 15 inch pile to make two strips in this quilt. After trimming the shirts down to the right sizes, I put them up on my design wall and started to measure the spaces between the shirts so I could add my “spacer” fabrics. I have a whole lot of flame fabric. Like a real lot of it. So I just pulled the car flames from my collection. Then I sewed the strips together. The goal was to make each strip the same length, so if I had to remove fabric, I wanted to take it out of the spacer fabric, than cut it off of a shirt.

At this point, I needed to add the sashing that would be the strips between the “quilt as you go” but not the strips holding the panels together.

Now is when you quilt the quilt! I made a little video of me quilting the strips together on my Instagram… It was easy to do with only the width of the strips to worry about!

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Now, you have to sew the strips together.

This is accomplished with a 1 inch strip sewn to each side of the strip. With a 1/4 inch seam, you then end up with the raw edges of the strips butted up against each other, and enclosed in the sashing. Sew another 1 inch strip to the back and then hand sew it down. This is a great tutorial on how to do this technique as blocks. I just did the rows instead of blocks… And of course, it needed orange binding!

Anyway, Dad is happy with the quilt, he’s said he’s already used it. And I am happy to make them, as long as they are as easy as this one!