Monday, December 26, 2011

Whitney's T-shirt Quilt

Don't you love husbands? Mine has a tendency to come up with ideas for me to do. He came up with the idea of making a t-shirt quilt for Christmas. Easy for him to say, isn't it? It was a good idea but it's not like it's a piece of cake.

Several years ago, there was a speaker at the quilt guild who briefly spoke about a t-shirt quilt she made. That wasn't the purpose of her talk but the thing I remembered was that she used her serger and she quilted the squares one at a time before the quilt was put together. No need to use stabilizer with this method. I decided that was the method for me. 

We discovered a box of tshirts in Whitney's closet. She's been married and gone for a little over a year now. So we figured what she left in her closet was fair game. I made a couple of mistakes and that being not taking into account that some of the graphics were large. I ignorantly thought I'd just make 12 inch squares then I came upon my first graphic that was larger than 12 inches. So I had cut up a couple of shirts that I wasn't able to use. I did have enough shirts to work with but there were a few shirts that I used the front and back because I either liked the color or the shirt had her name on it.
Here's the back of the quilt. The main fabric is from M'Liss Hawley and it's "Houston" fabric. I was short for one square so I used Wisconsin Badger fabric. Whitney is a Wisconsin alum and she now lives in Houston. Pretty clever huh?
 One challenge of this quilt was that for some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to have a different quilt pattern on each block. I ran out of brain power close to the end and I think I have four squares that were meandered.
 
 On some of the squares, I free motioned a word or two. This square has the words "50 yard line" in it. The Crazy Legs race in Madison ends on the 50 yard line in the Badger football stadium.
 Tried to mimic EKG waves.
 This square has "Bucky" in it.
 Her senior t-shirt has seniors name on it. I stitched Whit's name on the side.
This one was just one of my favorites. Simple quilt pattern that stitched fairly quickly. Love that!

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