Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Rock and Roll All Night

As promised, I am using this space to share completed custom orders.
Most of my more regular musings can now be found on Facebook and Instagram-- please join me!

Anyway, I just completed a custom T-shirt quilt out of an amazing collection of shirts:


Many of these shirts date back 30 years or more.  The oldest one with a date on it is from 1984.


Most of them are from rock concerts by iconic artists, including:  Elton John (twice!), Rod Stewart, Tina Turner, Fleetwood Mac, Counting Crows, Taj Mahal, Marshall Tucker Band, George Jones, James Taylor, the Eagles, Robert Plant (also twice), Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Petty.  There are also a few non-musical shirts from art shows, car shows and other personal events.


The biggest challenge for this project ended up being preserving the integrity of the designs (some of which are really iconic) while fitting them into the confines of a queen size quilt.  I mean, what are you going to do:  cut Tina off at the hips to achieve a standard 15" block?  I DON'T THINK SO. 


There's not a lot of additional fabric on the front of the quilt since I had a large number of t shirts to use but I did have a little room for a few fun guitar fabrics that I already had in my stash.


I love using extra wide 108" fabric for the back of a large quilt-- having a one-piece back just makes basting and quilting so much easier.  The cheerful magenta and white print is available here.  The binding is solid black fabric.


I did an all-over stipple quilting using a medium gray thread which blended nicely into both the white and black shirts (and everything in between!).  I used lightweight Quilter's Dream batting and, of course, my HQ Sweet 16 machine for the quilting.


I hope it looks as good in my customer's bedroom as it does in mine!


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