Family T-Shirt Quilt

I made this quilt for my husband around 1997 (forgot to put a label on it).  He had all these t-shirts from Civil War reenactments, car stuff, etc but not quite enough.  I had some t-shirts from trips for meetings (Chicago, DC, San Francisco) and races (Elby’s 20K in Wheeling, WV and a few local ones).  So I combined them to make this quilt using old blue jeans (both of ours) in an attic windows setting.

The quilt is machine pieced.  It measures 79 in X 97 in.  I used iron-on interfacing to stabilize the t-shirt fabric before cutting it to the finished size.  I did not do the quilting (too thick for my basic machine), but sent it to Peg’s Quality Quilting to be machine quilted.  I did do the binding of thin denim fabric.

The two shirts on the left and the upper right were my husband’s.  The Smithsonian one was mine.
In this set, the two on the left and the lower right ones’ were my husband’s shirts.  The Chicago one was mine.
The upper left one here was my husband’s and the other ones were mine. 
All of these were my husband’s.  I brought the one from San Francisco to him from a meeting trip.
I love the words on the bottom of this t-shirt:  “From the lips of God to the hearts of man, let the past be past. Let the dead be dead now and forever American. Anonymous, 1863”