Julie Finn
Back in 2012, I showed off my Star Wars T-shirt quilt top to you. I told you all about how I’d constructed it over the past six months from thrifted Star Wars T-shirts that it had taken me years to collect. I shared details of the log cabin style that I’d used to piece it, and the color scheme that I’d selected that would enable me to best utilize my stash fabric.
I told you that for my husband’s birthday, I planned to back the finished top simply with flannel, then quilt it.
When I said “birthday,” I meant “anniversary,” and when I said “planned,” I meant that I would do it four years later.
Four entire years later, here is the finished quilt!
This quilt top has sat in my WIP pile for four years. We moved in that time, and I took it with me. We got a bigger bed, and I put off finishing it, dreading having to enlarge the quilt from a queen to a king. Several birthdays and anniversaries and Christmases passed, and I always found something else to give my husband.
And then the new Star Wars movie came out (and if you haven’t seen it, it’s WONDERFUL!), and suddenly, there was all this Star Wars fabric in the fabric stores!
Want to know a sure-fire way to get someone to finish a years-old WIP? Tell them that they get to buy themselves some new fabric to do it!
Although the rest of the quilt is sewn entirely from thrifted and stash fabrics, it turned out that some new fabric was just the inspiration that I needed to finish this project up. I toyed with the idea of using my new Star Wars prints in flannel and cotton to add a border around the quilt, thereby resizing it to fit our king-sized bed, but everything that I tried looked janky. Finally, I decided that I’d rather have a quilt that I like the look of, even if it’s too narrow to fit our bed, than a quilt that fits well but gets on my nerves every time I see it, and I used that new fabric, along with some stash, to piece the quilt back.
Because I want to use the quilt in the summer, I didn’t use any batting between the layers. I put the front and back right sides together, sewed almost all the way around, then turned it and edge stitched the entire perimeter:
The quilt isn’t even technically a quilt, because instead of quilting it, I tied it at all four corners of every T-shirt piece.
Four years, my Friends, and in the end, this Star Wars T-shirt quilt took one day to finish.
I can’t wait to see what I’m going to accomplish in another four years!
That looks great! I have a similar quilt, though not as cool looking as yours, that I started when we lived in Iowa (4-5 years ago), mostly from the hubby’s old school and paintball t-shirts. I wasn’t smart enough to make big blocks to quilt with, so it’s mostly tiny random shapes stitched together. I got it most of the way done, then who knows why I put it aside.
Over the summer I decided it was either getting finished or donated, because I wasn’t moving it again as it was. Yeah, it only took me two days to finish it. We had the opposite problem though. I originally made it for a king bed, but now we have a full (for now anyway). I just left it giant so that it’s hard for the hubby to steal the covers in the middle of the night :0)
I’ve got to see pictures! I love the idea of breaking the shirts down into abstract images. If I’d had more shirts to play with, it would have been fun to do the log cabin pieces like that.