a West U quilt

Welcome to my post for the fall Blogger's Quilt Festival hosted by Amy of Park City Girl. The quilt I wish to feature is one that was made especially for the 80th anniversary of ...

West University Elementary School.

This is a T-shirt quilt featuring t-shirts from school spirit shirts as well as many school activities (book fair, auction, carnival, etc.) My challenging task was to assemble this diverse collection into one cohesive quilt, and finish it in time for the PTO's fundraising auction (nothing like a firm deadline to crunch then rush one's creative energy).


After much struggling with a uniform block size, I chose to trim each item, leaving a 1" - 2" border framing the individual logos. Next stumbling block was to add borders to these trimmed blocks. Could I find one fabric to use for all the blocks, uniting the quilt? No. Instead I opted to frame each logo with a themed print in colors to match. This required shopping for fabrics such as hot-air balloon, jungle, & golf prints (a delightful task). With school colors of red, white and blue, the spirit shirts were the easiest to frame. As I pieced the fabrics around the t-shirt logos, the blocks grew larger, still keeping their different sizes and shapes. Sewing the blocks together into one quilt top required more puzzling and thinking. Look closely to spy the spacer bars of school-themed prints I added to fill in gaps. The final outer border, an alphabet print, unified the diverse blocks into one quilt.

Curious note: Some of the blocks are not t-shirts. They are scanned and printed images from an original item loaned for this copying purpose. One logo was actually cut-out from a baseball cap ... can you guess which one that is?

I must extend special Thank you's to:
Kay for printing the computer transfers;
Carrell for donating many of her own t-shirts;
Avril and Catherine who worked tirelessly remembering which events were missing and hunting down someone with the logo to share.
and last but not least, Thank you to Mike Walton of Astro Quilting Systems (713-522-7876) for the custom machine quilting that finishes this school quilt.

For all my friends and acquaintances .... no, I do not make t-shirt quilts, but fear not ... I have not one, but two friends that do. If you are interested in turning your child's keepsake t-shirts into a one-of-a-kind memory quilt please contact either of these friends:

Sharon Dixon's Katy T-shirt Quilts
and
Betty Baker's T-Shirt Quilts of Texas

Last note: the quilt was not complete at the time of the school auction (Hurricane Katrina and a broken arm interrupted the progress that fall). Nevertheless, the quilt-top was a hot item at the auction that attracted many, until the bidders united to purchase the quilt and donate it back to the school! I could not be more pleased! My quilt now hangs in the front entry of West University Elementary School.