Category: Quilting

Christmas is quickly approaching and I’ve somehow managed to get roped into another project.  This time, I have to admit, I did it to myself.  They said they wanted to turn old children’s sports jerseys into a blanket and I couldn’t let them do it because I was sure they’d screw it up or just not finish it.  So I offered even though I’ve never done it either, but I’ve quilted enough blankets and seen enough videos to get going on it pretty confidently.

 

I started by chopping up all the shirts into halves and then began fusing each half to the stabilizer.  At the moment, I am currently cutting down each half to the largest size I can get out of it so I can figure out how much I have to work with.   Which also means I haven’t actually designed the twin sized blanket yet…  *sigh*

But, since this is my first jersey/shirt blanket, I thought I’d share a few things while I’m cutting away.

• The fusing is quite tedious and takes a long time.  This may not be a surprise to you but I usually don’t fuse the whole top of a blanket.  It will take you a night or two alone – make sure to put on a movie or two to keep you from getting too bored.
• This project will likely take more than a bolt of stabilizer to complete.  I had 8 children’s jerseys (16 halves) and I am almost through the whole bolt and I’m not even sure if I have enough jersey for the top of the blanket.
• You really can’t plan out the blanket until you have all your pieces fused, cut and squared.  Unless of course you are only using the images on the shirt and can measure just those areas.  I will likely have to fill in areas with random materials so I’m using as much jersey as possible.

Cutting all these shirts down will take a while, so I’ll have updates coming.