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Finally! I cut alle the shirts that I got from my collegues. For months they had lain unter the sewing table. But who has time to cut shirts when there is a Nearly Insane to sew?

Nearly Insane is done - I've time to do other things.

To learn the story of the Ukraine-quilts click here.

For Bonnie Hunter it takes 7 minutes to 'debone' a shirt. I need 10 minutes - that's not bad, but after that it takes time to iron all the pieces and fold them neatly to fit in a box. So it took me the evenings of almost one week to prepare all the gifted shirts.

I started with the pattern 'Swing your partner' from Bonnies book 'Scraps and Shirttails' , it's a 5x5 block.

I made 12 blocks and added blue sashing. The cornerstones are made of shirts too.

But!

Actually it's no fun to work with old shirts. At least with these worn out ones! There is a lot of work involved.

First you have to cut the shirts and iron them, as mentionend above.

Then you have to cut the stripes for each block. But the shirt-parts are never cut in rectangles. They are sort of curved, sometimes more (sleeves) sometimes less (front and back). It takes a lot of calculating and cutting to get a lot of usable fabric and only a few waste-fabric.

And it was not easy to sew with these old shirts either. They are veeeery stretchy, during sewing and ironing you can achieve whatever shape you want to :-(

So you have to pay a lot of attention during sewing and ironing or use tons of starch.

I will use up all the fabric I have for charity quilts, but I don't think I will ask for more old shirts!

It's different to make a quilt for friends - I'd do it any time...

I had a huge piece of fabric that I wanted to use for the backing, I had to cut it only on one side. I tried another technique for the binding: fold the backing to the front and stitch it down.

Oh dear - this didn't turn out well. I won't do it again!

I did not take a detail-photo of that binding, it's too embarrassing...