Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Aggie T-Shirt Quilt

We have this old quilt that we use almost daily while we are watching tv. It is probably Lance's favorite blanket, and it shows. It is slowly ripping and getting filled with holes. Before his last birthday, Lance made it pretty clear that a new blanket was something that he would really like, either for his birthday or for Christmas.

During our years at Utah State, we accumulated quite a few t-shirts, and I knew that one day I wanted to make a t-shirt quilt out of them. I decided that this was the year and that it would be a nice gift for me to give to Lance.

I spent a lot of time scouring Pinterest and the internet, looking at different ideas. Every t-shirt quilt is slightly different, and I wanted something that looked clean, had crisp lines, and was not supper cluttered and disorganized. I wasn't a huge fan of the super colorful, highly random and chaotic ones.

So one weekend while Lance had to go to Boise for a work trip, I headed up to Logan to spend some time with Scott and Sharon and to get started on this quilt. I needed a few more shirts to get the right sizing and colors that I was going for. Then we hit almost every fabric shop in town trying to find the perfect accents to go with it.

Back at the house, I attempted to design and layout the quilt. This was BY FAR the hardest part. It was tough not only deciding where each shirt should go in relation to each other, but it was difficult to know exactly what size to do each shirt (as I wasn't doing uniform squares). I had to measure everything about 200 times, trying to get everything to line up perfectly.
Then the sewing began.

One by one each piece started to come together. I made a ton of progress and got a great start that weekend while Lance was gone. I never could have done with without Sharon and Scott helping with the kids while I basically tuned everything out except working on this. I'm afraid I was a terrible guest.
 One I had all the individual pieces finished, I started sewing the rows together, and adding a border in between them. *I had more pictures of the process, but they were deleted as I was afraid that Lance would look at my phone and see them.*

A miracle happened, and the pieces all lined up beautifully. I got a bit tired of measuring over and over again, so I ended up just guessing on some of the pieces. So it truly was a miracle that they lined up so perfectly. I had finished this part of the quilt faster than I had anticipated, so I decided to add a fun border along the edge, incorporating some of the trim used to outline the squares.

Then I decided to be insane and I hand quilted the entire thing. I did every border, all of the letters, the bull, etc.

Then I added some batting and a piece of material to go on the back. It took me anywhere from 2-4 hours per square to hand quilt, so it was quite the project. But when I get started on something, I get a bit consumed with it. I would spent about 6 hours a day working on this, and I managed to finish it before his birthday. I turned some music on, and the kids played around me while I worked. It was actually a lot of fun and make the days go by super fast. I really wanted to give it to him then, but I decided to hold off until Christmas.
This is one of those few things that I truly feel proud of. I actually took the time to make it look nice and I am super pleased with how it turned out.
 Go Aggies!







2 comments:

  1. So cute! I love the border you put on it!

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  2. Best T-shirt quilt I've seen! I did one of those random messy ones for Ryan and I regret it so much...its painful for me to look at and when its left out it looks like a dirty pile of laundry. You did such a great job on this one, love it!

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