Work in Progress: T-Shirt Quilt

There are few things that my high school self was prouder of than my t-shirts. T-shirts for clubs, t-shirts for concerts, t-shirts for trips, for youth group, for sports, t-shirts for DAYS. I loved collecting them and I hated throwing anything away. My overflow drawer overflowed into a bin, which overflowed into another bin and another. I've always intended to make a quilt from all these memories, but my first attempt (on my middle school shirts) scared me from even touching my precious high school shirts. And so they sat in their overflow bins until an older, braver, and better equipped me picked up the project about a year ago.

*IF YOU WANT TO MAKE YOUR OWN T-SHIRT QUILT, GET A ROTARY CUTTER AND AN ENGINEERING DEGREE!!!*

I kid, but only slightly. In my opinion, the whole identically sized square t-shirt quilt is just not all that attractive. Where's the excitement? So my quilt, which is made up of differently sized rectangles, took quite a bit of math. Each shirt was cut into a rectangle of side length evenly divisible by four (4x4, 8x12, 16x16, etc.) plus 0.5" for a 0.25" seam allowance. That took time and careful measurement (and the rotary cutter), but the hard part began once all the pieces were cut - how the heck was I to fit them together? Cue PowerPoint. I counted how many of each size rectangle I had and made corresponding shapes in PowerPoint at a 1/10 scale. Then I played with it for months until I finally found an arrangement that gave me an appropriate WxL ratio and used almost every piece I'd cut.

pattern for my layout, divided into quadrants

After finally finding that perfect arrangement, I went back through the PowerPoint shapes and changed their colors to correspond with the cut shirts - they started out color coded by size to make the arrangement step easier. The correct color placement was imperative if I was going to pull off the whole this-is-randomly-placed-but-perfectly-distributed look that I was going for. Once that was done, I divided the mess into quadrants, strew the actual pieces all over my apartment floor, sewed each quadrant individually, and then sewed the quadrants together. Most of the rectangles fit together in some sort of grid, but the odd one or two required a little more thought to sew together. And so we have it, a t-shirt quilt top! 

kindly disregard can lighting/iPhone photo quality

I'm really happy with the way it turned out. Next comes the quilting, which I'm just about scared to death to get started on, but I really want to wrap up in this ASAP. The plan is to do alternating straight lines for each block because straight lines are about all I think I can manage on a beast this size, but that's not firm quite yet. Stay tuned, friends.