T-Shirt Quilts

T-shirt quilts are becoming a popular trend again, especially since there was a t-shirt quilt featured in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. I've made quite a few, (even before they got popular again) and wanted to share pictures of a few of them and give some ideas on fun/non-traditional elements to add to the quilts.

 I make and sell t-shirt quilts as a side job.  Most of the time parents find me when their children are graduating high school or college.  These quilts are a great way to preserve our memories and the core parts of our lives before we expand our horizons in college or the workforce.

 

(I blocked out her name on the jerseys to protect her privacy a bit)

This quilt was for a soccer player, and was one of my favorite quilts to make because they gave me lots of unconventional materials to work with.

 The skirt of her school uniform, which was way cool with all the pleating and the button detail.  I backed the skirt with fusible interfacing so that the pleats would stay where I put them while I was sewing on the sashing.

 Her goalie jersey and gloves!  I took out the spines in the gloves and hand stitched them onto the square.  That was a labor of love :)  The glove materials is quite thick, but how awesome to have her gloves as a keepsake on a quilt.

 I had a little bit of "leftover" space and didn't have a t-shirt to fill it, so I appliqued on a soccer ball with a net overlay.  The square next door featured a fun hat that flowed over from it's designated space, the points of the hat are hand-tacked down to the quilt.

All these purple quilts :)  This one is more traditional (and the photo was taken of the top before making the quilt sandwich).

This is my sister's t-shirt quilt.  She had A LOT of t-shirts that she wanted to include, and it was one of my first quilts.  We didn't know better, so we made it KING size, not fully understanding quite how large that would be.  I couldn't even fit the whole quilt in a picture when we were photographing it in her room.  She hopes one day to have a wall large enough to hang it on :)

 She had quite a few things that either were not graphics on t-shirts, but she wanted to use the fabric.  To make them visually appealing, we paged through quilting books to find ways to use the fabric.  This square was made from the outfit she wore performing when her chorus group took a trip to Disney World.  We both drove an old maroon van, so the choice of the van was also sentimental and incorporating another memory.

 This square was made with her outfit from prom.

 The sleeves of her Pathfinder uniform.  (Pathfinders is like Boy/Girl Scouts for Seventh Day Adventists).

 I love this purple material we picked out, it fits my sister's personality perfectly.