Rainbow T-Shirt Quilt

It's amazing how much fabric one can get out of a garbage bag full of t-shirts. 

You may remember that last year I made t-shirt quilt #1 and #2 for our school's ten year anniversary. 

After that, I made t-shirt yarn and crocheted a rug.

Amazingly, I still had a lot of t-shirt left over, mostly the sleeves. My friend Aldine had given me some parts of t-shirts too. I didn't want to throw them out, especially the colorful ones! So, I got to work cutting out the 74 sleeves I used for this quilt.

Depending on the t-shirt size, I was able to get 3.5", 4" and 5" strips. After cutting them out, I found every leftover piece of interfacing I had and started ironing. Attaching the interfacing is the reason why I don't like making t-shirt quilts. It's SO tedious! It's a really necessary step though, otherwise the t-shirts would be stretching all over when sewn together. 

I played around with a couple different layouts but in the end, rainbow order looked the best.

For the back, I found this fun black and white polka dot polar fleece. I didn't use any batting. 

This afternoon, I put on the Harry Potter marathon and started quilting on my machine. 

Hooray! My first finished quilt of 2014! I ended up using 59 of the 74 strips. 

It measures 50"x 58".

 I'm really happy to have that garbage bag out of my way now.

I can't believe how many projects I was able to do out of that bag of t-shirts!