T-shirt quilt

My daughter cut up all her husband’s favorite T-shirts.
She also cut up her own. Maybe the fact that they each owned enough T-shirts to fill a drawer explains why it look her five hours to accomplish the deed. That and she was trying to cut out the T-shirt logos in squares to make a T-shirt quilt. She ended up with 36 big squares and 15 smaller squares to line across the top.
The whole idea stretched my imagination. I’d never heard of a T-shirt quilt, but that didn’t keep me from offering suggestions for putting it together and overwhelming her.
Determined to finish the project this summer she started to pin the top line together. The edges were uneven, the task was difficult – the pile of squares began to look impossibly huge.
I offered to bring my portable machine and sew with her one weekend. Like the king in Rumpelstiltskin, she opened the door to her sewing room and showed me the impossible task: Convert 51 squares into a never before seen T-shirt quilt.
While she was finished her last afternoon of a summer graduate class in education, I began basting together the squares. I thought I needed to stiffen the material. I tried tape. I pulled tape off the first foot long seam for 10 minutes.
I decided to not use tape to stiffen the seams.
I used skills I learned one summer in a sewing factory and lined up the edges without pins or tape and basted them in place with the machine. Row by row I finished and arranged the quilt strips across her living room floor.
Two hours later she came home. Saw the basted strips and smiled. “This is so great. I had this on my list of projects to do this summer, but after I got started on pinning it together, I was not sure I would ever finish it.”
“It’s just basted in place. It all needs to be permanently stitched.”
“Okay. Do you want to go shopping for the backing material?”
We went shopping and came home with seven yards of sale priced flannel, filler batting, quilting needles and thread.
The flannel hit the hot water in her wash machine and we hit the sewing machines with a vengeance. A couple hours later, I held up the last seam, “you really need to be the one that sews this, so you can tell people you finished it yourself.”
She really didn’t care – she just wanted to get done. I took a break. She sewed the seam. The quilt top was finished, the flannel was out of the dryer. She sewed together the back and we sandwiched the quilt batting between the top and the flannel and held it together with safety pins.
Together we figured out how to use quilting needles to tie off the quilt. Mother and daughter sat side by side on the couch tying off row after row, rolling up the finished part on our laps as we watched the video.
Around 10:30 p.m. she told me I needed to go to bed, to be alert for my early morning departure the next day. “I know, I just want to see what this looks like finished,” I said and kept on stitching until I didn’t care anymore.
I stood up and stretched, “All you have to do after this is fold the edges of flannel up and over to make a finished edge and machine or hand stitch it into place.” I bent over to demonstrate and ended up pinning the whole thing before I sagged off to bed.
The next day, as I was recuperating with a nap, she called to announce, “It’s done. It took another hour, but it is Done! I am going to put it in my car and take it everywhere I go to have to show my friends. Thanks, Mom.”
Sure thing Hon, anytime you want to chop up a few more T-shirts, just give me a call.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)