Evolution of a T-Shirt Quilt
Posted by Lindsay Conner on Jul 27th 2017
This is Lindsay Conner, and I'm happy to be a guest on the C&T blog today! Along with Carla Crim, I am co-author of The T-Shirt Quilt Book, a book with classic and innovative T-shirt quilt designs, plus techniques to design your own. Along with the other talented contributors, I was excited to share my own unique take on a t-shirt quilt!
I contacted a friend of mine who owns a T-shirt company with all Indiana-themed shirts to see if he had any misprinted or ill-fitting shirts I could recycle into a quilt project. I was so thrilled when I opened the box! There were a variety of colors, but nothing too crazy. The logos were so fun and just what I was hoping for, to add some life and personality to my quilt.
Before I got the box of shirts, I pulled a couple of designs from the website and started playing around with online tools like PicMonkey and my Electric Quilt 7 program. I kind of liked where it was headed, but something just wasn't right.
This was a little bit better, but I still wasn't very excited about the design.
Now, I was getting somewhere. I really wanted something bold, with a lot of contrast that would show off the T-shirts. I also wanted to break up my design with a lot of solid shirt pieces or some coordinating solid knit fabric.
While playing around with Electric Quilt 7, I designed this! Once I stumbled on this design, I knew it was perfect for what I wanted to do. I was able to pull from the exact colors in my box of T-shirts. The white would be solid white and the colors would be rectangles and parallelograms of T-shirt logos or solids.
I was able to incorporate solid T-shirt backs into each row of parallelograms, plus a couple of logo shirts in the top and bottom corners for fun! I finished the T-shirt quilt with a free-motion squares quilting design and bound it in grey linen fabric. I called the finished quilt Indiana, and it's suitable for an intermediate-level quilter.
Thanks for joining me on this journey of a T-shirt quilt. I hope the The T-Shirt Quilt Book and the designs in it will inspire you to go through your own collection of well-loved shirts and create a memory quilt that you will treasure for years to come.
