Stitch and Bitch, but be sure to recycle!

When I graduated high school (TEN YEARS AGO!), I had a plethora of school related t-shirts from marching band, musicals, tennis, orchestra and other assorted activities. Like pretty much every other teenage girl, I had the brilliant plan of saving those shirts to make into a t-shirt quilt. Well, I got busy with college and the quilt didn't happen. But I did manage to keep a paper bag consisting of the shirts in my closet, parceled away from my Goodwill offerings, and there they sat in confinement until after college.

When my post college plan of finding a super awesome job didn't really happen, I re-discovered my t-shirt bag when rooting around for something to entertain myself. This time I decided to trim the shirts so that I would only have the portion of the shirt with what ever assorted graphic made it really cool. Who needs sleeves or necklines? So I proceeded to cut the shirts into pieces, and I also managed to secure the cheapest baseline model (i.e all plastic) Singer sewing machine I could find. Score! I should at this time mention that my t-shirt pieces were not cut with any sort of measurement or straight edge, or even design plan for all that matters -I just went at the shirts with a pair of scissors, which resulted in some not exactly rectangular or square patches. I then proceeded to use my supposedly awesome sewing machine to attach some polyester quilt batting, but that ended up being extremely difficult given that the sewing machine was a piece of shit in disguise. Needless to say, everything got put away until a few weeks ago when I re-discovered the t-shirt pieces and thought, "If I have to move these effing t-shirt pieces again, I am going to lose it." Sometimes you just need the right motivation to complete a project!

My one challenge with finishing the quilt was the fact that I had no big spools of thread, and I couldn't just wander into town to buy some. You would think that it would be easy to find thread at a thrift store since so many people have sewing boxes with tons of partially used spools. Unfortunately, for months I could only find used thread packaged with a bunch of crap I didn't need, like buttons, lace and googly eyes (who is making hooker dolls?) This week, however, I hit pay dirt at the OSU Folk Thrift Store and secured a zip lock bag with four spools of thread (white, pink, green and brown) and ten mini spools all for the hot price of $1.50. I got home, slapped the spool of white thread on my housemates legitimately awesome 1960s Singer sewing machine (all the parts are metal and I can fill and thread the bobbin in two minutes) and started to sew. It took me half a day spread over an evening and morning, given that the patches were inconsistent sizes and crooked, but I managed to get them together in a way that didn't look half bad!  When the front was complete, I cycled over to Goodwill bought a cute little twin bed sheet with butterflies on it to use as the backing and sewed it on. Voila! A quilt that is too small for a bed, but just perfect for curling up on the couch with a good book or laying on to watch Fourth of July fireworks.