My first T-Shirt Quilt - aka "The Beast"

I post pictures of my completed projects on Facebook to show my family and friends what I have been working on.  My cousin sent me a message through Facebook asking if I could make her a T-Shirt quilt for her boyfriend. She said he had a box full of old football T-shirts that were taking up too much room in the closet and she needed new shoes.  Well, I can certainly understand the need for more space for shoes so naturally I agreed to help a fellow shoe fan.  :)  

This was the first time I had ever done a T-shirt quilt so I did a lot of research on it to find out what I needed to do.  The key thing to any T-shirt quilt that I learned about: stabilizer, stabilizer, stabilizer.  Which was incredibly challenging to find!  I went to three different Joanne stores just to find exactly what I needed and still didn't find an exact match but got the next best thing.  My cousin sent the shirts to me and there were a ton of T-Shirts in the box, yikes!  A little intimidating for someone who hadn't done this type of quilt yet.  Only one shirt didn't make it in the quilt because it was a basketball shirt and not a football one so it didn't match the theme and was sent back in one piece.

Stabilizing a shirt takes a LONG time, especially with so many shirts to do.  The instructions for the stabilizer I bought said to press the iron into the shirt for 15 seconds.  It took me an entire day just to do the stabilizing for all the squares.

I sized all the shirts based on the logos which was difficult because some of the logos were smaller (about 12x12 inch squares) and the others were larger (15.5x15.5 inch squares).  Without a specific pattern to us it was daunting and I didn't know what to do with different size squares so to fix the problem I decided to add sashing and bordering to the smaller squares so that everything was a 15.5 inch square.

Since my cousins boyfriend is a fellow 49ers fan I decided to use 49ers fabric for the borders and backing with niners colors for the sashing on the smaller squares.

This thing turned out to be HUGE!  81 inches by 55.5 inches!  Because there was a lot going on in the squares already with the logos, I only quilted in the sashing and borders.  Turned out quite well if I do say so myself.   My cousin gave it to her boyfriend (who is now her fiancé, yay!!!) on Christmas and he loved it!  Happy once again to provide someone with a great gift and bring a smile to their face.  After all, that's what quilters do, right?  Bring happiness and smiles to those we love.