I Made This T-Shirt Quilt, and You Could Totally Make One Too

Kids collect t-shirts.  Every camp they go to gives them away.  They get t-shirts for their sports teams and clubs.  They get t-shirts to show school spirit.  They win t-shirts for being awesome.  There are t-shirts everywhere.

We used to just pass these on when the kids grew out of them.  I mean, what do you do with a t-shirt you'll never wear?

Then a few years ago I noticed that people were making memory QUILTS out of these things!  Stop!  Hold the presses!  Don't put that in the Goodwill bag!  I'll save it!  We'll get a quilt made!

So when Chelsea graduated last June, my intention was to send all of those t-shirts into a company that makes these things professionally.  I mean, I can sew a straight line, but I didn't have a working sewing machine then, and even if I did, there's no way I could do the quilting part.

Then I got a new sewing machine for Christmas this year, and  I walked by this quilt that I made for Micah in my young-kids-don't-leave-the-house phase and had an idea.  Why not make a rag top t-shirt quilt?

I googled it and realized it had been done before.  I read a couple of blog posts that weren't exactly complete, but put the pieces of them together and decided to give it a try.  It worked!  It's amazing!  My goal is to convince you that you, too, can make this awesome quilt, explain how to do it, and share some things I learned.

Here's what you need:
*  A sewing machine
*  Straight pins
* A good seam ripper
* Two spools of thread (I used white)
* Good fabric scissors (although the crafty ladies in my life are telling me a good rotary cutter would be better, but I can't tell you how to use it)
* An extra needle for your sewing machine
* Basic sewing skills (you need to know how to turn on your machine, cut fabric, sew forward and backward in a straight line, thread the needle and bobbin, and pin patterns to fabric)
* Enough t-shirts/hoodies to give you 40 pieces that have patterns on them
* About 13 yards of flannel in colors that you like.

Here's what I did:

1:  I figured out how big I wanted the quilt to be.  I decided I wanted it to fit on Chelsea's bed at school, which is a twin xl, so I googled the measurements of twin xl comforters.  Based on that, I figured that I wanted a quilt that was about 5 feet wide and 8 feet long.  Knowing that I could probably get squares that would finish to 12X12 inches, I decided I needed 40 blocks for the front of the quilt.

2:  I went through Chelsea's shirts and started counting out forty designs.  She had regular t-shirts, hoodies, and shirts from track and cross country in that stretchy/slinky fabric (Note:  if you are relatively new at sewing I'm going to strongly recommend NOT using the running shirts.  They proved to be trouble later.).   If one shirt had stuff on both the front and back, I counted it as two squares.  She had a long sleeved shirt from a run she did with a design down the sleeve, and I decided I could probably use that as well.

3:  Once I had the shirts picked out, I found the SMALLEST shirt in the pile to see how big of a square I could get from it.  It was a kids-sized shirt from Jump Rope for Heart, and I realized I could get a 13" square from it.  I made a 13" square pattern using a piece of newspaper.  Just to be sure, I placed the pattern over the t-shirt that I thought had the BIGGEST design and it fit! Cue mini celebration.

4:  I started taking the shirts apart.  I cut the collar and sleeves off at the seams.  I separated the front from the back by cutting up the shoulders and down the sides.  I discarded any pieces that wouldn't be a part of the quilt.  (Side note:  some very crafty ladies pointed out that I could have saved the scraps and done something like make a crocheted or braided rag rug, but I'm not quite there yet.)

5:  Using my newspaper pattern, I pinned the pattern over the design of the shirt and cut out the square.  This took a long time.  I seriously wanted to figure out a way to speed this up by doing multiple squares at once but decided against it because every pattern was centered on shirts differently. For the sleeve design, I cut down the sleeve opposite the design and then used the pattern to cut out the square.  It totally worked.  I should point out here that I actually ended up using 3 newspaper patterns total.  When my newspaper square started getting rough on the corners where I was pinning, I made a new one.

6:  With forty t-shirt squares made, I took Chelsea to the fabric store and we headed to the flannel section.  She picked out 7 different fabrics she liked:  two solid colors and five patterns.  I got 3 yards each of the solids, 2 yards of the two "favorite" patterns, and one yard of each of the remaining three patterns.  We took the flannel home and used the newspaper pattern to make squares.  There were some leftover scraps from the edges, and I'm sure there's some brilliant mathematical formula to reduce this, but I just embraced the process and went with it.

7:  I had Chelsea create a 5X8 design of both the t-shirt squares and the flannel squares for both the front and back of the quilt, and carefully picked up the design in rows, labeling each row in a very sophisticated way with paper and a pen. 

8:  Taking the square from Row 1, Block 1 from both the t-shirt pile and the flannel pile, I made a "sandwich": t-shirt square, followed by "extra" flannel piece, followed by "back" piece (for a total of three pieces of fabric) and pinned them WRONG SIDES TOGETHER.  That is, when I looked at the t-shirt design and flipped over the "sandwich," I saw the design that was supposed to be on the back.  This is important:  normally in sewing you are putting right sides together, but you aren't doing that here.

Also important to note:  you want to make sure if there's a printed design on the flannel that has a "top" and a "bottom," that you are making sure the top on your t-shirt design is on the same side of the square as the "top" of your flannel design.  For example, one of Chelsea's prints was a pirate design ('Sco Bucs!) so we made sure the tops of that square and the t-shirt square were facing the same direction.

For the squares that were made of sweatshirts, I didn't put a middle piece of flannel in the sandwich.  Those squares were JUST sweatshirt square on one side and flannel on the other.

For the squares made from the dreaded silky/slick running shirts, I added another piece of flannel.  Those squares were t-shirt square, middle flannel, middle flannel, back flannel.

I used the lighter colored flannel as lining/filler for white t-shirts.  I tried to mix up the colors/patterns I was using for the filling flannel to ensure the fringe would look fun.

As I was making my flannel sandwiches, I was still keeping track of where each square went in the order Chelsea designed.  I separated them into eight stacks of five.

9:  Now that all of the sandwiches were pinned, I celebrated that I had enough flannel (phew!  just 10 extra squares!) and started sewing an X through each sandwich.   I made sure to reverse at the start and stop of each line sewn to keep things solid.   I noticed that this went MUCH easier if I sewed with the flannel side facing up.  The t-shirt fabric and slinky fabric were less likely to move and pucker and look weird.  I still had to pull out several seams and redo them, but doing the flip to flannel side up saved me a lot of time and grief.  I didn't worry if the Xs were a little crooked, but did worry if the fabric didn't lay smooth.

10:  I took a break for a couple days.  This next step made me super nervous. Starting with Row 1, I pinned squares FLANNEL SIDES TOGETHER and sewed them using a 1/2" seam.  It's important to note that the finished product had raw edges on the t-shirt side.  That's what I wanted.  I followed this process for all eight rows, keeping them in the right order.  As I completed each row, I also sewed a 1/2" seam at the edges of the quilt (that is, anywhere that wouldn't be connected to fabric).  For rows 2-7, that was just the outside edges.  For Row 1 I had to sew the top and for Row 8 I had to do the bottom.

11:  Now that I had eight rows, I started combining rows, again pinning flannel sides together and using a 1/2" seam.  For this part, I had to be sure that I was pinning the bottom of Row 1 to the top of Row 2 so that nothing would turn out upside down (it did once, and that was a giant pain to rip out and redo).  Now I had 4 strips that were five squares long and two squares tall.

12:  Following the same process, I combined my double rows to make quad rows, then the two halves to make the entire quilt.  This step was the most challenging because at this point the sheer weight and thickness of the quilt made it difficult to sew through and move.   Somewhere in here I broke a needle, and that was a super fun side adventure figuring out how to change it.  The end result was pretty awesome to look at, raw edges and all.

13:  I used scissors and snipped little tabs on all the raw edges.  This took forever and really hurt at some points, so I did it over several sessions.  Someone told me I could use a rotary tool to do this, but that idea freaked me out so I didn't.

14:  I washed and dried the quilt, which created a nice soft fray on the tabbed rag top, and got rid of the extra fuzzies.  The result was amazing, and Mike immediately went to our bedroom and started finding his old t-shirts so I can make him the next quilt.

Overall, this project was fun, just the right challenge level, and turned out pretty stinking awesome if I do say so myself.