A Quilt for M

Last summer my sister in law M gave me a bag of her old tshirts and asked me to make a quilt out of them.  She had a friend who was going to do it for her a long time ago, but life got in the way and a few years ago she gave the bag back, mostly untouched.  M commissioned me to just finish what her friend had started.  And so I did.  They were here last week visiting for the holidays and I was able to give her her quilt in person.

These are all shirts from marathons she ran, places she visited (Egypt, Jerusalem, Denmark, Poland!) or people she helped working as a physical therapist.  It was a fun, though enormous project to work on.  The finished quilt is 94″x110″ which is almost King Size. My two brothers are holding it up for me and their average height is 6’6″.  We grow them big here.  I used a heavy woven cotton/twill for the back because it will probably be used as a picnic quilt more than a bed quit.

All the shirts she gave me were gray or white except this one.  And it just didn’t work on the front, no matter which way I tried it.  But I couldn’t very well throw it away either.  And it’s a good thing I didn’t because even though I bought 10 yards of fabric for the sashings and the back (that plaid is 60″ wide) I only had a tiny piece left.  You know, about 4″x10″.  I needed that shirt in the back just to take up some space!  Also, my brother are kind of dorks, especially that one in black. HA!  I hope you love it M!

Quilt Stats: 30 shirts for the front, cut into 14.5″ (unfinished) squares, I used more than 20 yards of lightweight interfacing, ironed onto the backs before I trimmed them down to keep them from stretching.  That’s important when you are quilting with knits. Sashing is 2.5″ finished, same as the stop border.  The outer border I think is 4.5″.  I wish I could have made it an inch or two wider.  Oh well.  The back has about 30 pieces in it, just what happened when you are sewing all the scraps together.  Which is also why the plaids don’t match up perfectly.  Bummer.  I added a grayish border to the blue shirt to help it stand out, and so the blues wouldn’t butt up next to each other and clash.  And because those extra four inches were necessary!  My friend Kellie at the quilt shop where I work quilted it for me, and I bound it in a light gray by hand.  If I was doing it again I would probably picked a little darker gray.  It didn’t look nearly so light before I had it all finished.  Isn’t that the way it goes.