On Being Suited to a T

I delivered a quilt this morning, one I was somewhat hired to make. I usually do quilts intended to be given to a particular person. This was the first I did at someone else's request, in exchange for, yes, money. As Homer Simpson was told, "Money can be exchanged for good and services" and in this case it was exchanged for a quilt. As I began to draft this post, it occurred to me that I did not post about the quilt I finished before this one. I finished that one some weeks before the recipient was in town to receive it, after which it just slipped my mind. I'll add something about that after covering the one delivered today.

Several years ago, a friend approached me about doing a quilt or quilts from t-shirts following her daughter from about kindergarten to adult-hood. I blogged about those quilts here along with one I made for my son to practice working with shirt fabrics. Then, in response to a karate master instructor's asking me to make him "something," I did a quilt of shirts from several decades of Myo Sim Karate and Kendo. That's the one I'll show below. As I was working on the two for my friend and her daughter, I was approached by a Facebook friend whom I met through the Charlottesville Photography Initiative about doing some t-shirt quilts for her. Never having done one for money, I perused various websites and set a rate of about the midpoint of what those sites charged.

When I finished the karate t-shirt quilt, I started the quilt delivered this morning, one made of t-shirts collected at various rock concerts or festivals over the years, centering on--I hope I get this right--Phish. The logos had already been cut from the shirts, meaning that I didn't have much leeway in terms of how to frame the images. I ended up going with blocks that measured 15 inches finished with something of a pattern in terms of the colors of the shirts. Here's the finished product.

I quilted each shirt square a bit differently. Here are a few of them.

I was very satisfied with the result and, more importantly, so was the person for whom it was made. When I delivered this quilt to her, I accepted another set of t-shirts, these related to a summer camp in Maine. While I may play around with design ideas now, that quilt won't actually get started until I return from Australia in early June.

The quilt of martial arts t-shirts was also well received by the recipient and all the more special because it was a complete surprise to him.

Here are just a couple of the squares.

This last one was not from a shirt, but is an insignia from when our school of karate was taught as a physical education class at, where else, the University of Virginia. There aren't many of the top symbols still known to exist, so I was quite grateful to the master instructor who gave me this one for a quilt for the master who had been his principal instructor.