In May 2014, my younger sister Amanda graduated from the University of Kansas (KU). We all flew out to KS to be there for her graduation and to celebrate together. Can you guess what my gift to her was? A t-shirt quilt of course!
So why am I writing about it now if she graduated months ago? Well she had a pretty busy summer so the first opportunity she had to give me all her shirts was when I saw her in Colorado over Christmas break. It actually worked out really great since I had a busy summer too. Plus, since she brought the shirts instead of mailing them, we got to work on it together!
First we went through and figured out what size to cut all the shirts based on the largest design and the smallest shirt. For tshirt quilts where I intend to cut them all the same size, it's sometimes fastest to take a picture of each shirt and then do the layout on the computer. So we took pictures of every shirt.
First we went through and figured out what size to cut all the shirts based on the largest design and the smallest shirt. For tshirt quilts where I intend to cut them all the same size, it's sometimes fastest to take a picture of each shirt and then do the layout on the computer. So we took pictures of every shirt.
Then bring the pictures into your favorite editor (I like using Excel actually since it is just a big grid). Then I crop each image to a manageable size and drag the pictures around until I'm happy with it. Plus excel lets you fill the cells any color you want so it makes it easy to simulate borders or sashing. Here's the quilt layout we decided on together:
It really gives you a good feeling of how the quilt is going to look. That way your customer feels confident they will like it...BEFORE you start cutting anything. She picked a pretty cool fabric for the backing too but you'll have to wait for a future post to see it (ooh the suspense! lol).
