Is there a better moment than the one where you are running around an empty parking lot wearing a quilt like a cape and flapping your arms up and down and your friend is in the car pulling up and he doesn't know that you finally finished the quilt you made for him out of all his old Young Life-thirts and then he sees you and doesn't know why you're running around a parking lot and then he gets out of the minivan and sees that the weird cape is actually a quilt and he says, "No way--is that my quilt?" and you say, "Yes!" and then you give it to him and he's really happy and also you can tell by the look on his wife's face that it is WAY CUTER than she ever imagined a t-shirt quilt could be?
Answer: nope.
And who doesn't want to do something terrific and loving for this guy?
Answer: nobody. He's one of the bravest, most willing-hearted souls I know. I was a giddy freak working on this quilt.
I had my dream Quilt Hand Off Scenario just the day before yesterday, so I'm still sort of beaming on the inside. And now I need to talk about making quilts out of t-shirts, since I've done it . . . once.
I saw a picture of a postcard quilt and liked the idea of using little samples of the (garbage bag + mother lode of a suitcase full of) t-shirts Scott gave me to pull together a quilt for him. There were so many shirts, that it made sense to get a little peek of each one. I didn't worry about the snapshot even really including all of the words some of the time. I just cut a piece out of each shirt around 6" X 10".
I cut 30 zillion white 2" X 6" strips of white cotton and joined the t-shirt blocks up with a little white cotton strip between. Then I cut (fewer than 30 zillion) looooooong white strips (the width of the quilt) to hold together each of the long rows.
When I went to the the quilting I just quilted around the edges of each t-shirt. And it sort of helped to pop each block. Plus it was easy, which I'm into. And then I made binding out of some brown polka dot cotton I walked by at the thirft store that yelled to me, "Come buy me to bind Scott's quilt with"--so I did, since I do everything that thrifted cotton tells me to.
And as it turned out, it was all Just The Thing because you know how weird and floppy t-shirt quilts are and how they look like a big piece of old clothes? Well, this Didn't. It Didn't Look Like Old Clothes. That might need to be the goal of all quilt making out of t-shirts.
So I highly recommend it. Go make one. You know every time I make something, I want you to go make one. That's how I am.
