My friend and I were talking about the piles of t-shirts that seem to take over our house from everyone in out families. So I decided to find a way to preserve some of the special memories in a quilt.
By Susan Drudig of Straw.com
Many quilters are interested in making tee shirt quilts for family or friends. Everyone has a collection of t-shirts they can't bear to throw away from vacations, rock concerts, sports or hobbies. Beginning quilters will have no problem making a T- shirt quilt of one of the types described in this article.
Your tee shirt quilt can be any size - a cozy lap quilt for the couch or a full sized bed quilt. If you have many tee shirts you can make every block from a shirt, but if you have fewer shirts you can put plain fabric in some blocks. The plain fabric can be cotton woven fabric or unprinted areas of cotton knit from your tee shirts.
Pull out all the tee shirts you think to use. Sort them by size of images on the shirts. Notice if there are smaller logos or designs on back and sleeves that you might also want to use. Roughly measure the sizes and make a list of the height x width of the designs you want to use. Remember to leave at least 2-3 inches around the edges of the printed logo or design for sewing.
You may have a range from as small as 4 x 5 inches (for sleeve or pocket designs) up to 12 x 15 inches from large adult tees. Smaller images and children's designs will fall in the middle. You'll see there are many quilt layouts for arranging the blocks.
Tee shirts (4 to 36 = number depending on size of quilt), Interfacing (fusible, woven type), woven cotton fabric for sashing and borders, fabric for backing (woven cotton, flannel, or polarfleece) and batting if you choose to use it.
Interfacing
There are many brands of interfacing. Look for a woven type or a nonwoven that is not stretchy (don't use a knit interfacing). You are using the interfacing to make the knit tee fabric non-stretchy for ease in sewing. Some interfacing needs to be pre-shrunk with water to avoid bubbles on the surface after fusing so read the directions from the manufacturer and test on a plain piece of tee shirt knit fabric.
Cotton Fabrics
You'll be using woven cotton (ie. regular quilting cotton) for the sashing and borders of your quilt. You want the stability of a woven cotton, not stretch from a knit. Pick a fabric that will frame your tee blocks nicely. You don't need to use a sashing, you can sew the blocks directly to each other.
Batting
You may want to use batting. A polyester batting with loft is fun if you are going to tie your tee shirt quilt. A cotton batting or blend is better for a machine quilted project. If you want a thin style quilt you could leave the batting out completely.
Backing
You may want to use tee shirts pieced on both sides if you have a lot of them. If not, a plain cotton backing used with batting is good. Or a flannel or polarguard backing is cozy and you can leave out the batting with these, too.
You can, of course, use just plain blocks made entirely 
from the image area cut from the tee shirts. Quilters seem to use a 14" - 15" block most often. But you may want to adjust sizes of a smaller image area so that not so much plain tee shirt fabric shows (by using something like the Diamond in a Square block). Or, you may want more variety in layout.
Here are a few block ideas. Use your imagination to make blocks anyway you want, there are no "rules" in making tee shirt quilts!
Some other ideas are to shape your block by adding fake "sleeve" sections so that they look as if they were mini-tee shirts.
These quilt blocks have images meant to indicate where the tee shirt blocks are.
Use a log cabin type of method to add borders to the tee shirt center. This allows adjusting the size of any tee shirt image area to match other blocks and is handy if you have a big variation of tee shirt sizes. Add more border than you are sure you need and then use your template to cut out the block to desired size.
Enjoy and post any finished products for us to see! Happy Quilting!
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