Bloggers' Quilt Festival~

Yay, the bloggers quilt festival is here!

I'll tell ya, I've been waiting for this round.  I finished this quilt at the beginning of May and it's been hard to keep it a secret since then..

This is my T-shirt quilt, started in January of 2007, mostly assembled at the 2008 Silver City Guild retreat, quilted last fall, and I finally finished the binding a few weeks ago.  Like most of my quilts, the process was long, I learned a lot, and enjoyed just about every minute.
There are t-shirts from 1990-2005, 15 years of my life!  Most are shirts I wore in college, and I included one that Costas was wearing when we first started dating.  I used fusible interfacing on the backs of the shirts and then just stitched them to strips of my favorite fabrics, sometimes working in log cabin fashion, sometimes just putting pieces together as they fit until I had blocks big enough.  I made 5 or 6 complete patchwork blocks (no t-shirt fabric) from the crumbs left from the other blocks. I used up a lot of my favorite fabrics in this quilt, and for the years that it sat as a UFO I sometimes found myself saying "dude, where is that ____?!" and searching the stash for it, only to find it later in this quilt.  Yeah, that's how it goes around my sewing room sometimes...
We've been using it on our bed since I finished it and George loves it.
(He pays attention to each detail..)

He wakes up in the morning and tells me what's in each picture.  There's one hypercolor shirt with animals that he is particularly fond of and it keeps him busy for a long time... and the Mr. Bubble on the bottom, dad got me that shirt in high school when I hadn't used Mr. Bubble for years.. and now George just started using it so he gets excited about that one too.

These were the T-shirts I just couldn't throw away, even when they got worn and stretched out.  I mean, check out this Engrish:

This shirt was in my apartment in Hokkaido when I moved in.  LOVED it!

This came from a Japanese thrift store.  Never fit  very well, but I needed to have it, you know?

From my time in the traveling drama troupe (it says "Hokkaido Players"  "Let's Musical"):

And one of the crumb pieced blocks:

I like this quilt because it captures so much of my life in one nice 104"x104" frame.  I think it'll have to be our winter bed quilt though because the polyester interfacing makes it really warm.  If you're thinking about making this type of t-shirt quilt I'm happy to answer any questions, but if you think I'm still saving t-shirts for the next one, you're nuts.  It was a labor of love, and one is enough.