Extreme Sewing - t-shirt quilt edition

I made a t-shirt blanket!!!! I think I nearly killed my sewing machine in the process of it, but I'm glad for the moment I'm done tinkering around with this project.  I thought of a bunch of little projects that I wanted to start, but I had to keep telling myself to tackle one thing at a time. I was inspired by my Aunt Vicki's blanket that she whipped out for her son Michael.  This woman is a wiz on a sewing machine, so I don't know why I thought that if she could just get one of these out in no time flat that I could as well.  It took me FOR-EV-ER to get this project done.  I made up the pattern, and I actually enjoyed doing the math and trying to figure out how many strips of fabric I could get out of what I had already bought.  I'm pretty ghetto when it come to sewing... (I've never actually used a pattern, even when I sewed myself a tank top and skirt in high school with left over material and old pants my mom had in the attic.) So staying true to form, I made up the template for the blanket and went for it.  We found all our t-shirts that have sentimental meaning, and it was hard to throw them out, and we cut them up! Dane helped with cutting out the squares, which wasn't exactly a science.  If we had been more exact with our cutting it would have made things easier down the road.  First I sewed long strips together...

 That was a tedious process.  I got sick of sewing all those strips together so it would go long stretches between when I would actually work on it.  Finally I got all the pieces sewed together.  Then figuring out how to do the backing.  Dane wanted a jean blanket because it would hold up well for family picnics in the future as well as little league and soccer games that we'll be going to (he was really thinking long term here).  So we bought a huge strip of denim. I cut it in half, sewed it together, and then figured out how much of it we would actually be using.  I had thought about a way to do the corners, so I was excited about that.  It's funny how I have to figure out what people have already taken the time to not only figure it out, but write it down.  So people like me can read it, but I guess that's where the hiccup happens.   Reading has never been my strong point... even though I have been reading a couple books lately... but that's a different subject all together.  I sewed that dang blanket up, on 3 1/2 sides. Then, I climbed in between the layers with all the batting in hand, and rolled it out into all the corners.  It was slightly bigger than what I had sewed, so about 8 inches on the right side of the blanket is a little more squishy than any where else on the blanket.  (Once again... sewing with no pattern, just go with it.) I finally got all that batting in place, then I sewed the edges down so the batting wouldn't slip all around.
 
I started to sew down individual squares so the batting wouldn't get it's own agenda in the middle of the quilt.  I got several squares done, but not all of them since that's right when we exported all our furniture over to Megan and Glen's house.  I don't know about you, but trying to sew a huge quilt with no table isn't my idea of a good time. 

Our lovely quilt! Finally finished.

Since we had packed up our bed set to be shipped out to Boston we actually slept with this quilt for a couple weeks... Yes, it actually fit our king size bed! (It was turned the other direction and didn't hang over the sides very much, but it worked great.  I'm very proud of my little... actually... quite big t-shirt quilt.