Another Recycled Quilt from Shirts And Curtain Fabric

 This quilt was the inspiration for another one I wrote about recently as it was my first foray into using old shirt material to make the squares and triangles that make up the design for this quilt.  The old shirts were from my son and husband and had accumulated in my fabric stash and were just crying out to be used for something.  I also used some old curtain fabric -- the satiny brown fabric -- for the side striping that finishes off the design.  And I used a piece of old flannel sheeting for the backing. You can tell that I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to bits of fabric!

Again, I used the fast triangle sewing technique to make up the squares pretty quickly.  If you are working really fast, and a bit slapdash like me, you can skip using the ruler and pencil and just eyeball sew it.  When I cut the squares out, I use a 5" by 5" square piece of cardboard as a guide for the size of each square.  After making as many squares as you can generate from your fabrics, it's time to lay it out and see how you can arrange them in different ways.  This particular design (the blue and orange plaid squares) is called a windmill design and it's easy to do if you just lay them out ahead of time and turn the squares in the right way.  I take my time with designing these, and in this case it was a full week before I had it figured out!

 Once I put the larger squares together it was time to join them together with strips of grey plaid shirting and then finish it off with the bronze edging.  I also stitch-in-the-ditch in a few areas, to join the top piece to the bottom, once I've joined the flannel back to the designed portion. But I don't quilt all of the top to the bottom portion as I like my "quilts" looser.
Lest you think I sew this up in a day or so let me tell you that this type of project can take me several months to complete. I may just cut up the shirting fabric scraps one day. Another day cut them in the 5 inch squares.  Another day stitch the triangles, and yet another day to lay it all out. And yet another day or week to put the surrounding strips on.  The backing on this quilt project was some leftover flannel sheeting I had and that gave it a nice soft feel. I didn't use batting to fill it but I could have used some old blanketing or another layer of flannel sheeting had I wanted this to be fatter and warmer.  I just left it this way, essentially two layers of fabric.  It's just great to tuck around me when I'm reading in bed -- as it's about 4 foot by 4.5 feet wide, and I didn't want something too big.  This size makes for a great lap quilt for keeping you warm watching TV on the couch too and is a size that folds up neatly and can be easily stored nearby where you might use it. Everything was scrap fabric so again I felt virtuous upcycling, recycling and reusing all these bits of fabric that were piling up in my fabric stash.