T-Shirt Blankets for My Boys



This past Christmas, I decided to give each of my five boys a special, personalized gift--one that wouldn't cost all that much in dollars, but would be priceless in a different way.

I spent hours web-surfing, looking for a place to have t-shirt quilts professionally made (something I've actually wanted to do for them for a long time now), using cast-offs from their schoolboy days that I still had stashed away in piles all over the house; but then I decided that I wanted to tackle these quilts on my own.  It wasn't so much that I was bothered by the high cost of having someone else create these one-of-a-kind gifts for my boys; it was more that I simply wanted to, as my oldest son used to say in his toddler years, "do it my own self."

I can sew, but I'm no quilter; so the ones I made are technically t-shirt blankets rather than quilts (with no fluffy batting inside, just backed with cotton sheeting).

I spent a great deal of time on--and had a great deal of fun with--the making of these gifts, and I infused them with something a random on-line seamstress couldn't: immeasurable amounts of a mother's love for her now-grown sons.  I think my boys liked them, if the smiles in the following pictures are any indication.

It felt good to make use of close to 150 old t-shirts for this project--some of them still bearing indelible, ground-in dirt stains from football practices long ago.

Even though I used so many up to make these blankets, I still have lots of leftover t-shirts that I ought to give to Goodwill but can't part with quite yet.  But at least the piles have gotten smaller since Christmas!

Here are some photos from the trenches, as I plugged away at this daunting (at first) but ultimately rewarding DIY project.

All I can say is, phew, I finished! With all that was going on this past fall (the birth of a grandson in October, and in November, the wedding of a son and the publication of a new book--not to mention lots and lots of travel), I wasn't sure I was going to have the blankets completed and under the tree on Christmas day.  But in early December, I stitched my last seam...and then my poor, overworked sewing machine up and died on me.  The old girl was a real trooper and managed to keep chugging along, although I could tell she was straining towards the end.  And now I'm either going to have to get her motor fixed or buy a whole new machine.

It was all worth it, though, for this: