Quilts from Men’s Shirts
Great Ideas for Memory Quilts, Keepsake Quilts and for Recycling Men’s Shirts!
Men’s shirts have a lot of usable fabric for creative quilters to work into quilts. Recycling is always a great idea, plus men’s shirts provide the ideal fabric for more masculine quilts.
All-cotton shirts, besides being more comfortable to wear, are perfect for this, although poly/cotton blends will work too. Thrift stores are an excellent source for inexpensive shirts if you simply want to recycle fabric into a more masculine quilt. Just be sure to choose shirts in good condition with little wear.
The condition of the shirt is a bit less important for keepsake and memory quilts. In those cases it’s the shirts themselves that are important and a little wear just adds to the memories.
A man in your life is sure to love a keepsake quilt made of old favorite shirts. Families will be happy to have memory quilts (and pillows) made from the shirts of a loved one. Or, maybe you just want to use of some of that free fabric hanging in your guy’s closet (shirts he no longer wears, of course!).
Mamaka Mills has an excellent tutorial for breaking down a man’s shirt and getting the most usable fabric from it.
Nancy-Rose at Life is a Stitch offers a tutorial for making a quilt from 7 shirts. She also provides instructions for extracting the fabric from a shirt.
Once the fabric is extracted you can use it however you’d use quilting cotton. You can even include the button and buttonhole plackets and the pockets for added interest in your quilt.
The following photos are some of the many creative quilting projects we discovered using men’s shirts. Be sure to click the link under each one to learn more about it.
Shirt quilt by the quilter at Serendipity Patch.
Memory Quilt made of shirts from Petit Design Co. The free pattern is available here.
Quilt by Sandara, found on Jenny’s Doodling Needle.
Quilt from men’s shirts. Notice the button plackets. Pinned to Pinterest by Jane Nogiec.
Quilt from Men’s shirts by Kay, quilted by Bobbi. Notice the button plackets in the border. Found on Quilting Board.
Shirt from recycled shirts and sheets by Creative Chicks. Found on Flickr.
Value Quilt from Old Shirts by Anne of Surely Not Another Project.
Quilt made entirely from recycled men’s shirts. Quilt by Regan from Floating on a Quilted Cloud.
Rita from Red Pepper Quilts used button and collar labels in her “Worn and Washed” quilt. It also has a great backing. See more pictures here.
Old jeans, shirts, and pjs make an appealingly weathered quilt. Found on Pinterest.
Label from a memory quilt made of T-shirts, ties and work shirts. Quilt by Angela at Quilted Joy, made for the man’s family. See more here.
This baby quilt was made from Pawpaw’s shirts. From Cara’s Closet Children’s Resale Boutique in Gulfport, MS.
Pillow with a pocket, made from a man’s shirt. By Leigh-Ann from Freckled Nest.
Memory Pillow. Pinned to Pinterest by Chrissann Gasparro. Visit Ducklings in a Row for instructions for making similar pillows from men’s shirts.
A napping quilt by Bev Drew. Made for her brother from Dad’s shirts.
We hope you’ve been inspired by these creative projects. What will you do with old men’s shirts?
