Baby's First Year Quilt

I was contacted by a friend several months ago who knew I was doing t-shirt quilts.  She wanted to know if I could make a quilt of her daughter's onesies and outfits from her first year.  At first I wasn't sure how I was going to pull that off.... baby clothes are so tiny!  And since this was a little girl, there were ruffles! Lots of ruffles to work around.  She showed me some ideas she had seen online and it didn't take long for me to figure out how I was going to make her wish come true by preserving her sweet angel's clothes from her first year of life into a quilt that she could enjoy forever.

If you've been holding on to your kid's cute little outfits from when they were tiny and are interested in having a quilt made, don't hesitate to contact me.  joyleighlane@gmail.com or 850-896-1410 

How many shirts do I need to make a T-Shirt Quilt??

Whenever someone is thinking about having a t-shirt quilt made, they always ask:   "How many shirts do you need?"   And my standard response is as many as you want.  But over the last few months I've learned that my standard response isn't very helpful!  In my experience I've had people come to me with garbage bags full of t-shirts wanting every last one of them in a quilt.  On the other end of the spectrum, I have a few friends who are trying to steal t-shirts from loved ones one at a time to be able to surprise them with a quilt at Christmas time and want to know the minimal number they need to make a quilt.  

So for those of you out there who are searching high and low for a minimum number of t-shirts, the magic number is generally around 15.  And remember, if there is a design on the fronts and backs, we can use both sides so that would/could count as two t-shirts!    But for those of you who have like maybe 17 or 18 t-shirts, I can usually make it work by combining t-shirts  Here are some visuals so you have a better idea of what I'm talking about.

You can see where I combined the Wicked and Keyettes t-shirts into one block.   This works when the logos are smaller in size.   You can also see were we incorporated her name into the border of the quilt.   So for this quilt, we had 16 shirts and just combined two into one square.

Here we combined two front logos with a front smaller design.  So we essentially got 3 shirts into one square here.   Sometimes even where there are enough shirts, I may use pocket logos just to eliminate a bunch of "white space"  in the quilt.   

Here I combined 4 pocket logos to create a square.  If I remember right, this quilt was a little short on t-shirts to make the right size, so I combined 4 front logos to make a "filler square' 

Here I worked in three pocket logos as well as a side design into the border.
The possibilities are really endless.
 

Now most of those quilts pictured above were 15 square quilts, but for those of you on the other end of the spectrum, that have so many shirts you don't know which ones to pick, we can do a 20 square quilt, a 25 square quilt.... I've even done a 30 square quilt - and remember a square can be a single side of a t-shirt or we can still combine shirts to make squares like you saw above.  

This quilt to the left actually just has 13 shirts in it, but due to the huge designs I had to increase the size of the squares so that nothing important would be cut out.  So if you're shirts have huge designs on them, it may not take as many to get to a decent size quilt .    The quilt to the right is made up of 22 t-shirts

And here is the the biggest quilt I've done to date.  It was HUGE!  This used 31 t-shirts total!  

Anything is possible.  Just get your shirts together and email or call me and we will get it all figured out!!   Hope this helps you in figuring out how many t-shirts you want to put in your t-shirt quilt!  If you have any questions - please do not hesitate to send me an email (joyleighlane@gmail.com) or call me at 

850-896-1410.