What Did I Do With All The T-Shirts? – Part 2 (Laying Out The Quilt With The Awesome Quilt Professionals)

February 1, 2014

Picking up from yesterday

So, I got to Ohio. And I took a little field trip to Bexley, since that’s where Keepsake Theme Quilts is located.

They have such an adorable, lovely business. I had a really fun time taking a visit. Before going, we’d washed all my t-shirts, and stuffed them in a suitcase. Upon arriving, super friendly/nice Janet took me to the basement to lay out all my quilts on their huge work table.

Since I was getting the “Runner’s Delight” quilt (the biggest one offered, holding 49 t-shirts), my squares needed to be 12 inches instead of the normal 15. They had plastic squares in both sizes so you could hold them up right over your t-shirts and see how much design you could use from each one.

(Side note: I did a few smaller/cheaper races with no t-shirts. So, 49 spaces worked perfectly!)

I had a good idea going in there of what parts of each t-shirt I wanted, but I felt even better going over it with a quilting professional who knew what would look great.

My original assumption before going over all the shirts was that I’d probably just want the front of each one. However, a surprising amount of shirts had the coolest stuff on the back. A lot of Rock ‘n’ Roll series shirts have cool stuff on the back. Big Sur marathon had something nice on the back.

Plus, some shirts had cool things on the sleeves. One of the things that’s great about Keepsake Theme Quilts is that they can take part of the front and back or things from the sleeves and put it all into one square so you get all the best parts of the shirts together.

For instance, the Halloween themed race I did in L.A. (Rock ‘n’ Roll Los Angeles) had all the main information on the front, but this really cool-looking witch on the back. Boom. Keepsake Quilts put ’em together in the same square. Ba-bam!

So, we went though and Janet tagged each one as we talked about it, so we had everything in numerical order and the instructions were explicitly clear about which parts went in the square.

There was something slightly bittersweet about knowing all these great shirts were about to be cut up. There was a slightly stressed voice in the back of my head saying “Are you sure you got all the very best parts of every shirt?!” But I’m confident we got what we needed.

Also, I have duplicates of my very favorite shirts. I decided mid-way through the year that a quilt was something I definitely wanted. So I started trying to track down/buy extras of the shirts I adored (such as from the Indy mini).

(I’m actually wearing that one even as I type this to you – even though I’ve already given up my shirts for the quilt. Neat, huh? ;))

This is where I’ll pick up tomorrow.

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