Hard to believe, isn’t it? On August 21, 2008 I hit the “Publish” button on my very first post. I wanted to post something fun to commemorate the occasion, so here is the UFO to end all UFO’s.
Many, many years ago, three things happened in glorious synchronicity. I was the thinnest I had been in my life. I had a job with an extremely casual dress code. And (it’s impossible to overstate this) graphic t-shirts were seemingly everywhere. They’ve been around forever, I know, but suddenly there were swaths of them. This resulted in my amassing a collection to rival the local stores and turning a t-shirt and flared jeans into my de facto uniform.
Times change, though, and I moved on to a job that made us dress like we were in an office. T-shirts were still weekend wear, but some of them got a little small. Some new ones came into the closet, jockeying for space with the old ones. I’m a sentimentalist with a memory for detail, and couldn’t just get rid of most of them – they all had a story! I had seen t-shirt quilts in craft books before, but that felt like a really big project. (One of them assumed the crafter might not have enough t-shirts and provided instructions for using ink-jet transfer paper to create their own specifically for the purpose of cutting them up to sew.) Still, the idea was intriguing, and I started pulling shirts from my collection and setting them aside.
Reader, I gathered 30 in all. 30! I had no idea I owned that many, or at least, I was subconsciously repressing that knowledge.
Now, where was I? Oh, yes. I pulled the shirts, arranged them in a quasi-rainbow to get a feel for the balance of colours, and promptly ignored them for…a while. What was I supposed to do with them? Where should I start? This is what I get for picking a project that didn’t come with its own pattern.
Eventually, I decided squares would be easiest. I got a 12″ square peel-and-stick floor tile from the hardware store (genius!) and used that as a template, centring it on my shirts and then running the rotary cutter around it. This method meant that I actually got two 12-inch squares from each shirt – front and back – and for a brief moment I considered assembling the plain back squares into the backing of the quilt. Thank goodness I didn’t, because I’d probably still be sewing it today. The upside is, I now have 30 ultra-soft 12-inch cleaning cloths as a nice eco-friendly alternative to paper towels. I arranged and rearranged my 30 front squares until I had a 5 x 6 grid I was happy with. I took a picture for future reference (still more genius!), and then…ignored them for a while. Yes, there’s absolutely a trend developing here.
I knew I wanted a non-stretchy fabric in between my squares to prevent, well, stretching and distortion later on, and picked up some inexpensive solid-coloured flannelette that fit the bill nicely. I cut strips 12″ long by 2″ wide out of blue flannelette, and cut 2″ squares out of pink to go at the “intersections”. I didn’t think to take any pictures of this, but I did ignore it for a while after getting my pieces cut out.
When I was ready to assemble, I started making horizontal rows of five shirts, with a 12″ x 2″ strip between each one (for a total of four blue strips per row). Does anybody want to hazard a guess as to what happened? That’s right – I sewed “filler” rows of five blue strips with four pink squares in between, to eventually go in between the t-shirt rows…and then I ignored them for a while.
It might sound like there was a lot of ignoring going on, and while that’s true to a degree, I’m grateful this wasn’t the kind of project that had to sit out in the middle of the floor or dining room table while it was being ignored. In fact, it was something that could be sewn in steps and would have been a reasonably quick project were it not for the stashing away and ignoring.
Somehow, I managed not to lose any of my rows (t-shirt or straight flannelette), and slowly…painfully slowly…would pin and sew on a row at a time here and there, as the mood struck me. The rows were about five feet long, less seam allowances but plus flannelette strips, and needed to be laid out carefully on the floor for pinning. I had to be mindful not to stretch any of the t-shirt squares (although it did happen, at least a little bit), and found it was easiest to start by lining up my pink squares in the filler rows with the blue strips in my t-shirt rows. Once I had done that, I just had to keep the t-shirt and the corresponding blue strip lined up.
At long last, all six t-shirt rows and five filler rows were sewn together into one big piece that actually looked like it was supposed to. A traditional quilt includes a layer of batting in the middle and then a backing, but I’m not a traditional quilter. I bought some pink fleece for my back, figuring it could do double duty as the warm and snuggly part, too. I cut it to size and then lined it up with my quilt top (wrong sides together) and ran a zig-zag stitch all the way around to hold the layers together before adding my binding, which I also attached with a zig-zag stitch.
The other thing I didn’t do that might shock quilters is…I didn’t quilt it. I had weighed the merits of “stitch in the ditch” around my pink squares vs. going old-school and tying yarn through my layers at strategic points, and then decided against both. There’s no batting inside to move around and bunch up in one corner, and the fleece tends to stick a bit and stay put, so once this baby was bound, it was done.
My old photo ID for work featured me in this shirt:
In all, it took me just shy of nine years from the initial pulling of shirts until the final stitch. When I said UFO, I meant it! But oh my stars, was it ever worth it. It’s the perfect weight for a summer cover instead of my comforter, soft and snuggly without being too heavy. It would probably make a great picnic blanket, but I will not be risking grass stains after how long it took to get it finished. In the time since I first started gathering my shirts for this project, I’ve easily acquired that many again (and probably more)…so who knows; there may be another, hopefully quicker, t-shirt quilt in my future.
As always, thanks for looking! 🙂
The Witty Child 