gair's [birthday] surprise

Well...A couple of weeks ago I posted that I was going to {sew} something for Gair's birthday.  Well...I have always wanted to make a blanket out of old t-shirts.  Sew I decided to ask Mrs. Heady if she had any of Gair's old Irmo t-shirts (where he went to high school like a gazillion years ago) :)  Gair's house burned down about 6 years ago, so he thought that all of his old stuff had burned in the fire.  Well.....I was so excited that I could surprise him with TONS of his old t-shirts.

Since I am horrible at keeping surprises (especially ones that I am really excited about) I obviously told him what I was planning on doing!

First I washed all the shirts and figured out which ones I was going to use....I cut the shirts in half and measured that I  was going to have to make each square 17x17 inches.  I made a template out of cereal boxes so I could trace a {perfect} square on each shirt before I cut them out.

Here is my little work station on the dining room table.  This is while I was cutting the shirts.  I tried several different ways of cutting them...I tried using a blade and using the big clear ruler things, but that didn't work to well on the t-shirt material, I also tried cutting more than one at a time...but that didn't work either because I was too scared they would come out all crooked.  So I just cut ALL 20 shirts by hand!!!!

Then the next step was to lay them out and decide what order they were gonna go in.  This part was cool because it actually was looking like it was all COMING TOGETHER :)

This is a picture of all of the shirts placed on the bed how they were going to be sewn together.  Not an actual measurement, but the blanket was 4 shirts x 5 shirts.  Gair's shirts were all really big though!

I don't have any pictures of the next couple of phases in my first little sewing adventure :(

The next thing I did was sew the t-shirts together to make rows.  After I did that I had 5 rows of 4 t-shirts.  After that I sewed the rows together to make them all into one big piece.

Im gonna be honest, after I did this...I had no idea what I was suppose to do next.  {sew} I went to Hancock fabric and bought batting that I was suppose to sew to the back of the big t-shirt that I had made.  Then I had to decide what fabric I was going to use for the back of the blanket.  I was going to do fleece but there is such a different in t-shirt material and fleece so I wasn't sure about that.  {sew} I decided to go with a lighter flannel material, because that feels a lot like a t-shirt.

{sew} I came home and started sewing the batting onto the back of the t-shirts.  This was a little tougher than I thought!!  Then I cut the black flannel to measure the same size as the t-shirt side of the blanket and put it on the sewing machine and started sewing the back on.  You have to sew things like this inside out {sew} that the seams don't show, {sew} once I was almost done I had to leave a little opening to flip the blanket inside out and then whip stitch that part closed by hand.

The last part I wanted to do was put a few stitches where every corner of the shirts met so the blanket wouldn't separate in the middle.  This part was very time consuming!

{sew} here is the FINAL PRODUCT!!  Oh yeah, and it's obviously not a birthday surprise for Gair anymore since I can't keep my mouth shut!!

If you think you might want a blanket made from your old t-shirts please email me at braden.hancock216@gmail.com.  I only did the back of Gair's with flannel because he did not have enough shirts to do the back with t-shirts too.

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend!