I made this quilt as a commission for my friend’s mom, for my friend 🙂 Their mom supplied me with a bunch of t-shirts from my friend’s childhood that otherwise weren’t being used, and I got to work!

First, the idea was to have these shirts in a different format that my friend could actually appreciate and use. I did an inventory of the shirts, most of which only had designs on the front, but some had a front and back design. There were a couple repeats, so I figured I could put them in different areas on the quilt or exclude them, depending on how many squares I needed. Below I’ve included some of the calculations I did for this quilt – I had about 50 things I could make into squares, so I thought about different grids and calculated the dimensions for each. I settled on a 6 by 7 grid using 13.5″ squares, with a 3″ border for the quilt top (on the right of the picture).

For the back, their mom and I decided on a three colors in a stripe format, and I had to figure out what the widths of each panel would be. I thought about doing the stripes on a diagonal, but the math just didn’t work out that way (bottom left). I ended up doing straight stripes with a 6″ border (bottom right), using the same fabric for all the borders and the binding.

Then it was time to start cutting squares! I cut them out and lined them up in the order I wanted to sew them into the grid; I sewed the squares into columns and then the columns into the entire quilt top.

After constructing the quilt top, I added some borders – to add size to the quilt and to stabilize the entire thing. Most of the shirts were made of stretchy woven fabric (honestly, very difficult to sew, I had to use tissue paper to make the edges stay flat so I could piece them together) so I wanted to have that non-stretch cotton around the edges to lock everything together.

I quilted the whole thing with zigzags across the row seams, and then went back to do some wiggly lines up and down and around the different designs to stabilize and add some fun.

Project completed February 2022

This was a gift for two of my best friends who got married last summer! For their gift, I was inspired by the log cabin block, since our friends often gather at their home. I’d never done a log cabin quilt, and it’s a very traditional quilt, constructed by sewing strips of (usually) the same width to a “rotating” block.

I wanted to minimize my cutting, so I used pre-cut 2.5″ strips define my block and calculated the lengths from there. My idea was to put the strips in rainbow order and have each color “march” around the block so that, say, red would start in the first position, then for the next block, purple would be in first position and red would be in the second position. (see below) This meant I cut all of the lengths from all of the colors, with some finagling (also, see below).

Then I was able to assemble my blocks, which I did one by one because I wanted to stay super organized with the color order. They weren’t all perfect but I am super pleased with the results.

Originally I wanted to arrange the blocks in the order I made them, with red in the first position in the first block, second in the second block, but that didn’t look that good 🙂 so I mixed them up and tried to design it by keeping busy prints scattered throughout and no prints touching each other.

This was my first quilt with sashing, the borders around the blocks. Sashing can make a quilt bigger without the need for more print fabric, and gives the eye places to rest between the busy blocks. I used a nice gray for the sashing, which ended up being really nice with such vibrant, saturated colors in the blocks.

As usual, I vamped on a few motifs for the quilting – as illustrated below.

Overall, I’m really pleased with the final result and I was so happy to make a traditional quilt in a modern, bright way.

Completed June 2021.

Print: Punch Batiks by Kathy Engle for Island Batik
Binding: Wilmington Essentials – Crackle Stone by Wilmington Prints
Backing: Punch Batiks – Fern Green Apple by Kathy Engle for Island Batik