In honor of my daughter’s retirement from competitive irish dance, I stole her dance t-shirt collection and set off to quilting class. Catherine at the Button Box held a t-shirt quilt workshop using Tula Pink’s stack quilt as inspiration. While I wasn’t in love with the colors in Tula’s quilt, it’s a great pattern and perfect for using a myriad of odd sized t-shirt logos.
I often struggle with bringing a disparate group of t-shirts together into a unified piece. However, the stacks pattern allows for the use of a lot of small pieces and repetitive strips that spread the colors more evenly than is usually possible with a t-shirt quilt. This project was made even easier by virtue of the fact that many shirts were from her dance school, and so there was a color theme of blue and orange running through the collection. So I guess we were compelled to make it more complicated by adding the colors of her favorite dance costume (though there was no way that I would actually cut up that dress!$$) … mint green, black velvet, and yes, the zebra print lining.
It’s a large quilt, and was a lot of work, but it did a masterful job of converting that unruly stack of t-shirts into a lovely, usable memory. It’s not quite complete as I’m still in search of the perfect zebra print fabric for the backing … 