A Manly T-Shirt Quilt

I've made t-shirt quilts before and to be honest, I've never really been a fan.  The ones I've made have all been simple, mostly just consisting of a bunch of square t-shirt fronts sewn together in a grid with a piece of fabric for the back.  They always just feel so... blah.

Anyways, I was commissioned a while back by a friend to make a t-shirt quilt for her husband for his birthday.  It was a challenge for me both in that I didn't want to make the same old "blah" thing, it's just not my style, and in that I only had 11 t-shirts to work with.  Sashing was definitely going to have to be on the menu for this quilt.

After much pondering this is what I came up with:

The tricky part was to figure out sizing.  I settled on a set width with varying lengths.

 

I pieced together this block from sleeves of the t-shirts

 

One shirt didn't fit on the front so I added sashing around it and pieced it into the back.

I had a lot of fun quilting this, though it was very difficult to keep the lines in the plaid on the front straight while keeping the quilting straight and even.

The backing is a dark grey flannel that matches the plaid flannel I used on the front.  The binding is made by me out of black flannel, and for the quilting I selected a black thread.

I hope they're both very happy with it and that it gets a lot of use in the future.  I'm also happy to say that my stance on t-shirt quilts has changed, and that now I might need to dig through some of my husband's old shirts to make him one too.

-Stephanie

p.s. I'm linking to Manic Monday and Fabric Tuesday.