When my cousin Karen was going through the bags and bags of clothes her kids had grown out of, she set aside a bunch of shirts that held sentimental value. The shirts the kids really loved the most. And every single one of them turned out to be a superhero shirt.
Her boys love to play dress up, to come up with complicated scenarios where they save the day, and everything they own has some heroic emblem of one kind or another on it. So when I saw the pile of shirts she was creating, and the enormous pile of clothes she was giving to me, I knew I had to return the favor with a T-shirt quilt.
OK, it’s not my best quilting work. I realize now why all the T-shirt quilts I’ve seen are tied. Oh how I wrestled with this one! The softest jersey I could find also had some spandex in it, so I had to choose between quilting perfection and upping the coziness. Coziness won.
Being two small boys, I didn’t have enough fabric to do a straight ahead patchwork, so I bought a ton of that infernal gray spandex jersey and set about patching it all together.
I fussy cut each T-shirt to get as much of the image as possible, cutting the back of the T-shirt the same size at the same time. I laid them out on the floor, spacing them out how I wanted them to appear on the quilt top, then I sewed a strip on the top and bottom as necessary so that each piece measured 11″ high. I just changed how thick the bottom pieces and top pieces were so that the images would be staggered across the row.
Then I measured the space between each T-shirt as they were laid out across the floor, and sewed in another piece of gray jersey at that measurement.
I used the back of the T-shirts to make the back of the quilt, so I made the back and front of the quilt at the same time by just duplicating all the pieces I was cutting out.
I sewed the rows together, sewed on a big border, and then sewed the back and front together, right sides together, leaving an opening for turning. I stuffed the batting inside and rolled it out flat, then sewed a line of topstitching all the way around the outside to close it up and disguise the opening.
Doing this again, I would tie the quilt in a few places because those knits do NOT want to stay where you want them to stay. But this time I machine quilted a few squares around the quilt.
It really is remarkably cozy. It’s almost enough to make it worth all that wrestling I had to do. I think these two little boys will just be excited to sleep with all their favorite heroes protecting them through the night.