This was a BB (Before Blogging) project that I’ve been meaning to post about for some time, because I think it truly is a too cool t-shirt quilt. Most t-shirt quilts I’ve seen are 1. cut a uniform size, regardless of the design on the shirt, 2. backed with stiff interfacing, and 3. have sashing strips to border each square. The Too Cool T-shirt quilt method gives a really amazing quilt that has none of these!
Andrea Funk, the creater of Too Cool T-shirt Quilts developed a unique way of constructing a t-shirt quilt so that the design is captured and highlighted and you end up with a beautifully soft quilt without stiff interfacing. I first saw this method at a booth Andrea had set up at a race finish. As you can see from my quilt, I’ve run a number of races from 5ks to Marathons. And this isn’t even all of my shirts up until the time I created the quilt!
I won’t get into the details of the construction – you can buy the book through her website or on Amazon if you want to do it yourself, but it involves templates of varying size, and some math to make it all work out. The book is very descriptive and I didn’t have any trouble putting my gigantic quilt top together. She describes how to address issues like off-grain printing and sewing with knits, as well as tricks to making this style of quilt work, like working in sections and adding a temporary binding.
You can send a box full of t-shirts to them to do the entire thing, buy the book and piece the top and have them quilt it (what I did), or complete the whole thing yourself by tying the quilt or long arm quilting it yourself.
Here’s my pieced top all set up to be quilted! They sent me these pictures as it was being processed. Getting this quilted was a birthday present from my husband several years back.
Here it is in progress – she looks like she’s ready to jam out while she sews!
On each shirt, they’ll either freehand a design, or trace the outline of the shirt design. This is the shirt from my first marathon!
Here’s the backside of the Honolulu Marathon shirt – they outlined “finisher” and added a starburst design around it.
Another traced image. Sorry for the fuzzies on the quilt – I probably should have thought about backing it in black (or should have gotten out the lint roller before taking pictures)!
This is not a sponsored post but I REALLY like this method for preserving your t-shirts in a beautiful and unique way. This would be a wonderful gift for someone. The book is $16.37 on Amazon, and I think it’s absolutely worth it. The cost of having it quilted isn’t cheap (especially for my gigantic king sized one!), but the workmanship is top notch and it’s a bargain in my opinion. Plus, you know they know how to handle quilting on knits, which isn’t the case for most long-arm quilters.
I was just talking about this with my uncle the other day. He has a ton of racing shirts and this makes a great way to preserve them.
Thanks for sharing your tips.
Rachel
http://www.holy-craft.blogspot.com
This is so much cooler than other t-shirt quilts I’ve seen. I have boxes of sorority shirts that I would love to do this with.
Wow you’ve run a lot of races! Are you planning on running another marathon after some time? What’s your best time? Do you follow a specific marathon training program? I’d love to start running sometime. It’s cool to meet those who love to craft and run.
I love this idea. Sometimes you can’t use all those t’shirts, but this is a really good way to not just chuck them. My goal in life is to run a marathon. Lol, since I’m just at 5.5 miles right now, it could be a while.:)
This is awesome! I love the style of your t-shirt quilt. I made mine when I was 19, it isn’t near this cool.
I already saw a lot of sites promoting different kinds of tees prints but none creates a good design as cool as yours.
That looks terrific! Hard to believe it’s a first-time effort with a new technique! 🙂 How do you piece together all those odd-sized rectangles without dealing with awkward 90-degree angles where two different edges join? Every time I think it looks like you’ve got a column or a row going, there’s a piece crossing at an odd spot, breaking up the straight-line construction. I’ve only ever done traditional piecing, like log-cabin blocks, and I can’t visualize how you could do this!
Andrea gives a lot of detail in the book about how to do this crazy-quilt technique with knits. Essentially, you do a half seam leaving a couple of inches unsewn until you add the pieces around it and then go back and sew all the half seams later. With the stretch of the knits, it worked great!
I finally understand how it can be done after I read your explanation of the “..half seams”. Now I believe it’s possible for me to do it…I wasn’t so sure before. I ordered the templates and book from “Too Cool T-Shirts” website and I can’t wait to get them. I have t-shirts of my Grandson that passed away and now I finally feel I am ready for the project that will memorialize him and have something nice to cherish of his.
I’m so glad my explanations helped you decide to go for it! It’s a big project, but definitely do-able!