Carolyn's T-shirt Quilt

I've been wanting to make a T-shirt quilt based on the method outlined in this book for a long time, especially after seeing the quilt my friend Cindy made for her son's graduation.  When Carolyn's mom asked me to make a quilt for her out of her extensive collection of t-shirts, I knew the time had come!

I love the look of this style of t-shirt quilt, but it does take plenty of t-shirts with motifs in a variety of sizes.

The process of graphing out the various size blocks and laying them out in a puzzle format is a bit time consuming, but so worth it.  It's actually a lot of fun!  And, it was really fun stitching all those partial seams - definitely not boring.  

The book walks you through each step, including the partial seams; it was much easier than I anticipated.

This method allows you to use blocks of all different sizes, which adds so much interest to the quilt.

A personalized label adds the final touch!

(I printed the label onto Kona Cotton with my ink jet printer, then heat set it with a dry iron, just like Jessica's label.)  To prevent the backing fabric from showing through the label fabric, I lined it with a layer of the Kona cotton, fusing the edges of the lining to the label.  It was a bit tedious and fiddly, but I'm glad I took the time to do it, especially with all the fine printing on the label.

Thanks, Laurie, for allowing me to shoot these photos at my beloved yoga Studio, Vital Tree Yoga.

(Indoor photo shoots are warranted these days by all the snow that is happening outside our doors!)

*Note:  While I did follow the method outlined in the Too Cool T-shirt Quilt Book for laying out the blocks, I did not follow her recommendation to not use fusible interfacing.  I have always found that a very light weight fusible interfacing applied with the stretch of the interfacing going vertically against the t-shirt makes a world of difference in stabilizing the blocks.  I went with the cheapest, lightest-weight interfacing I could find, and that did the trick!