throwback week - t-shirt quilts

here we are, with the collection of t-shirt quilts i scrounged up.
granted there are a few more that i didn't even post on craftster (including the most recent one i made myself) so here is the handful to suffice.  there really isn't much to say about each one of these, so they'll be less words, more photos.
this one for aileen was made using wonder under and coordinating fabric prints to sandwich the t-shirts to. since her shirts were smaller, it was hard to get them all to be the same decent size, so this is how we improvised.
i had the crazy idea to do a double sided one for ben when he got his first t-shirt quilt. i kept the same layout for both sides, but switched up the thomas the tank engine fabric. remember... ben is my age. and this was made for him as an adult. that's how we roll in this house.
i didn't have enough blocks for this one for my uncle barry, so i added red fabric pieces in between, as well as hand painted two of the blocks myself. hand painted meaning tracing & filling in. no way did i free style those!
lastly, these are two of the three t-shirt quilts i made for myself.  the one on the left is the one that started all the madness.  every other block is hand painted in one way or another, and the rest are shirts i generally wore during zero period all four years of high school.  including some that i swiped from joshua over the years.  the quilt on the right is a collection of dance t-shirts my aunt bought for me over the years, and i decided to create this mini t-shirt quilt with a dance theme to it.  the back has a daisy kingdom ballet shoe print, and yes... that ballet bear is cross stitched on there as well :)
i've got one more throwback trick up my sleeve.  come back on friday!

joshua's t-shirt quilt - christmas 2013

there really isn't much elaborate excitement to say about a t-shirt quilt.
i generally don't get super fancy with them.  just giant blocks to best feature the t-shirt designs.
my mom had been gradually sneaking shirts from my brother's closet at they got small, faded, over worn, or the favorite result, worn through.  i busted out this t-shirt quilt pretty quickly.  well, at least the front assembly.  chopping out blocks while watching SNL episodes is pretty convenient.  a few of his shirts had backs to them that were somewhat significant and since i couldn't fit them on the front, i figured out a way to work them in to the back.
christmas morning he did a good job of either being surprised or faking it, since so many times i was working on this quilt, he would come home from work, or pass through the living room.  thus limiting the time frames that i was able to work on it, or have it fully laid out on the floor.  all in all, its probably one of my better t-shirt quilt results.  all blocks look pretty evenly spaced and sizes without anything being super crooked.
yeah, i'm pretty happy with how that back came together.  i had the tractor fabric in my stash for another purpose, but it just fit so well with joshua's past desires of construction and building stuff.  well, i guess he still does that anyways, but it just involves lighting and staging instead of birdhouse kits & front yard trebuchets.
lisa asked me how many t-shirt quilts i have done... and i had to count it up.
i have 2 big ones and 1 small one (first one.  second one & small one apparently didn't get blogged or craftstered)
aileen has one
ben has one (which is more like two since it's double sided)
uncle barry has one
and jacob got his christmas 2011
so i think joshua technically makes #9 of the t-shirt quilt variety, and i am sure there are more to come.  i know erika wants one, and there have been shirts collected from markham's drawers as well as more from aileens.  as well as the kliban cat shirt collection.  man, there are going to be t-shirt quilts for DAYS.  good thing they're pretty simple to make!  just need lots of interfacing :)

jacob's t-shirt quilt

well now that things are redone here, christmas has come and gone, and the new year is here... i can now begin the parade of christmas gift posts. i'll kick it off with the first one that was on the "to do" list for the longest time. jacob's t-shirt quilt.
the last few shirt quilts i have done were just solid blocks, so i decided to shake things up a bit. the width of all the blocks were the same size, but the height was changed depending on the size of the shirt graphic. of course, that made for some tricky math, and needed some filler space here and there.
my mom cleared out some of her old boxes, and found some scraps of fabric from clothes and such that she had made for jacob years ago, so i incorporated some of thse in to the quilt to make it a little different than the others. it ended up being much wider than it was tall... so i guess he can either use it sideways, or wrap it around himself a time or two.