A quilt down memory lane...

I am amazingly sentimental person. This, unfortunately, has many, many draw backs. The main of these is the fact that I do have a tendency to hoard anything that has anything and everything as I cannot bear to throw anything away. Over the years I have got better as my husband is the complete opposite and with the arrival of our little girl it has made room a little restricted.

The biggest thing I found difficult throwing away was a box of old t shirts. I haven't worn t shirt properly since I was about 11 it over many, many years I seemed to have accumulated loads of them from productions I've worked on and west end shows I had been to see plus my London marathon shirt (a feat I still can't quite believe I completed) and a few other random ones from my university years. It seemed a pity to throw so many memories away so I came up with the idea of making a quilt out of them.

I had never made a quilt before so I tried to base it on first principles. I cut out the bits of the t shirt I wanted and then lay it on my living room floor ... It took up most of it. I pinned together the pieces roughly and then measured how much material I would need for the backing... And I needed quite a bit!

Something I love it to is go around charity shops. As part of my day job I usually have to have a good root around for props and stuff for productions so charity shops are one of my favourite places - and you are giving something back which is always nice to do too.

I found a beige flat sheet in a charity shop and thought it would make a good back panel for my quilt. I also bought a couple of metres of bias binding to neaten the edges at the end. (As you have probably gathered from my previous posts I have discovered that bias binding helps with so much ... Give it a go!)

After pinning the pieces together I sewed together a row followed by another row until I had roughly five rows of t shirt pieces. The biggest challenge though was that I hadn't kept the pieces uniform which made keeping the rows together quite difficult! If I attempted this again I would keep the pieces uniform in size and length!

When I had the rows I started sewing the rows together until I had the whole thing.

What I hadn't planned for was the fact that t shirt material is quite stretchy so left a few gaps in the finished panel so I found some off cuts of some fabric I liked and filled the gaps with it.

I then pinned the back panel to the front panel and then pinned bias binding around the edge. I then sewed two lines of stitching around the edge to bind the panels together.
Simple as that!
This was an ambitious project. I think next time I will do something a little more simple!