A Father's Day Quilt

A few months ago, Kevin and I did a major cleanout and donation run with all the clothing neither of us wear anymore.  Kevin literally has hundreds of t-shirts... many freebie's from work or trade shows he attended.  Some were actually purchased.  From the ones that he culled, I pulled aside the Mariners or sports-related tee's that he was ready to get rid of to make into a quilt.  I have made one other t-shirt quilt using my college sweatshirts, t-shirts, my high school grad t-shirt, and when I needed some more material I printed off my diploma and my picture from graduation.

College quilt, not a great presentation but it's from the "archives":


That was a learning experience.  I used pieces of material as filler, and then framed it with some Robyn Pandolph fabrics that worked with the crimson.  Finished in 2006.  I used a fleece backing (a Washington State University fabric) and it has a batting.  Along with the sweatshirt material, this is a heavy quilt.  AND the preferred quilt by all the guys in the house.

So with that learning experience under my belt, I went for a more planned version for Kevin's Father's Day quilt:


Though most of the shirts were from the Mariners (we had season tickets for a couple of years, so there is a freebie or two along with purchases), I included a shirt from our honeymoon in 1996 (we went to a Giants game, they lost), a shirt from when he was a coach for Daniel's little league team, and then the Texas shirt? I am not sure where that came from, but we'll say that represents Daniel's birth state :)


I'm not really sure how the shadow effect worked, I'm wondering if I should have used half square triangles in the corner where the white squares are, or maybe framed the blocks first.  The best looking one, imo, is the red with the shadow.  The white shirts don't look as good.


The quilt ended up being literally a "(almost) quilt in a day" quilt.  I worked on it for the day when Kevin and the boys were at cub scout family camp (yeah, I am feeling guilty about not going, but boarding the dog was not something I wanted to do.  I need to see if any neighbor's might want to check in on him next time).  My binding got a bit stretched when I was sewing it on, so it has a slight wave to it.  I am attributing that to the fleece mainly, that takes some getting used to.  At least with the t-shirt material, it had a stabilizer ironed down so the stretch and curl did not happen.

Two issues I had:
1) rubbery screen printed shirts are hard to quilt with, using a foot that isn't metal may help with the "glide" factor.
2) I used a very lightweight interfacing that I also used in my first quilt--well, I think it was a bit too lightweight compared to the other lightweight interfacing I just bought.  The shirts that had the newer interfacing quilted much better and they hardly stretched at all during the quilting process.

And our happy customer: