Pauls Birthday and T shirt quilt

front and back side of Pauls quilt

                This past week I have been working on a quilt for my brother Paul. My brother loves the shows from the 70s especially the Monkees. I wanted to make him a quilt with some of his favorite shows. I was unable to get material that already had the logos printed on them. So I stewed on this for a couple of weeks. I came across several sites that made t shirt quilts. My brother has many t shirts of his favorite shows that he does not wear anymore.

            So, I managed to talk  him into giving them to me. I could not find enough t shirts to fill an entire queen size quilt, so I used a solid light grey block for every other block.I cut the tshirt blocks out one inch larger 15" and fused a lightweight interfacing to make the tshirt stable. I trimmed all those down to 14 inches. On the backside I used an assortment of blocks i put together from different cartoon materials i found at Joann's, Hobby Lobby, and  Walmart. I cut those blocks 14 ". I made  a 3 inch black sash on both sides of the quilt.

          Then I thought about quilting them both together and when I laid them out on top of one another they were off by one inch...so I would not be able to quilt them both together...that is, front, batting and back...so I thought and thought and decided to make a duvet cover. I took the one that was one inch bigger and cut it down all around. I bought a 72 inch zipper, placed it at the top and then sewed up all the seams much like a huge zippered pillowcase. I also added snap tape on all sides of the duvet on the inside seam line corners the duvet. I did the same for the comforter. Then i laid the duvet inside out..attached all the snaps of the duvet to the comforter and flipped the comforter inside and zipped it up..I didn't like it.

                      

         So back to the drawing board. I fiinally decided to take the duvet apart at the seams...I took the top part,which was the tshirts and quilted that to an old sheet with batting in between. So only the top was quilted. Then I took the top part and laid it on top of the back part (the cartoon blocks) and stitched all the way around. I then bound it with the same grey used in the t shirt top part.