Robbie's graduation quilt

A few weeks before my youngest graduated high school earlier this year I thought how fun would it be to take his old shirts and make him a quilt. I can get it done before he graduates. Sure, you keep thinking that Robin. haha.

Back in middle school Robbie fell in love with plaid shorts and shirts. He wore them year round. Short sleeve shirts and shorts in the warm months and long sleeve with a tshirt and jeans when it got cold. His friends started calling him Plaid in middle school and the nickname just stuck.

Miss Whiskers knows that the quilt is for her boy so she kept laying on it whenever I was working on it. I love the look of diagonal line quilting with rail fence style quilts. This is my first time diagonal quilting and it took forever and used a ton of thread. I don't remember the measurements but I think it's around 84" x 96" give or take a couple inches either way. Robbie is 6' 4" I believe so I wanted it nice and long. Totally worth the trouble though. I figured with the diagonal quilting if any of the shirts started to fray it will be contained.

I made a video while I was cutting up the shirts. For the front I decided to use Mary Quilts Forest Brick pattern. It's a favorite of mine.

For the back I used some of the leftover fabric from the cut up shirts and other scraps that I had laying around. I tried to stick with things that represent Robbie. He loves blue so there's some dark blue strips of fabric back there. I like to add any leftover blocks from the front. The burgundy and gold strip is part shirt and the gold is a fabric that represents some pants that he wore all the time.  Put together it reminds me of Harry Potter and Gryffindor colors. Harry Potter is a part of most kid's lives nowadays.

Here's my helper again. I feel like she's glaring at me and saying something like "don't you dare touch my boy's quilt". Silly kitty.

I found the perfect plaid fabric in my stash for the binding although I did go a little overboard when cutting. That's the leftovers. I didn't bother measuring the quilt and just went ahead and cut up all the fabric. The extra will go in my binding container.

This is the first quilt I used my new binding foot on and it worked rather well. Just like anything else there's a learning curve. It takes a bit of practice so if you try one maybe use it on placemats or wall hangings first.