Athletic T-Shirt memory quilt with homespun fabric
If you have ever been involved in high school athletics, you know that it generates lots of great t-shirts. A very popular way to memorialize those times and events is to create a t-shirt memory quilt. The quilt featured below is one I did for my son and daughter-in-law. They were both high school athletes at the same school and between the two of them, they played soccer, basketball, baseball and track. This quilt was a labor of love but they were so thrilled with it! If you do something like this, be sure to have plenty of tissue on hand. All these memories can get emotional!
Fair warning! This project is not for the beginner. You can find a more basic t-shirt quilt tutorial here if this one seems overwhelming. Basic t-shirt quilts use one t-shirt front per panel. This quilt design uses several shirts and graphics compiled into each panel. The panels in this quilt are rectangular and measure 13 x 17 inches. I pieced together the panels by seaming the shirt pieces together in some places and overlaying them in other places. When making the first cuts on the t-shirts, make them much bigger than you think you will need. Better safe than sorry!
Once I got the panels done, I used two layers of homespun fabric for the backing. There is not batting in this quilt. The t-shirts alone will make it very heavy.
The seam allowances (and thus the resulting fray) face the back homespun side of this quilt. I trimmed the t-shirt fabric that came through to the back to a short 1/4" allowance and thus it was fairly well hidden by the fray of the homespun. I have no detailed instructions on this one. Just some in-progress pictures with notes, some inspirational pictures and a "good luck" wish! This one was time consuming but oh so rewarding!
Fair warning! This project is not for the beginner. You can find a more basic t-shirt quilt tutorial here if this one seems overwhelming. Basic t-shirt quilts use one t-shirt front per panel. This quilt design uses several shirts and graphics compiled into each panel. The panels in this quilt are rectangular and measure 13 x 17 inches. I pieced together the panels by seaming the shirt pieces together in some places and overlaying them in other places. When making the first cuts on the t-shirts, make them much bigger than you think you will need. Better safe than sorry!
Once I got the panels done, I used two layers of homespun fabric for the backing. There is not batting in this quilt. The t-shirts alone will make it very heavy.
The seam allowances (and thus the resulting fray) face the back homespun side of this quilt. I trimmed the t-shirt fabric that came through to the back to a short 1/4" allowance and thus it was fairly well hidden by the fray of the homespun. I have no detailed instructions on this one. Just some in-progress pictures with notes, some inspirational pictures and a "good luck" wish! This one was time consuming but oh so rewarding!
Click on the pictures below to see additional notes.
