Spring Cleaning Part 1: Upcycling Old Shirts
It's no secret: I have about 4 billion t-shirts. Between Marching Band, my sorority, my service fraternity, bar tees and running, I have dozens of shirts that I don't wear, but also don't want to part with. Luckily, Project Repat has a solution, and offered me a t-shirt blanket to try out!
It took a ridiculously long time for me to send my shirts in. I decided that since I still run in a lot of my race shirts, I wanted to send in my college shirts for the blanket. I had to go to my parents’ house to get said shirts, and then began the nearly impossible task of choosing which shirts made the cut. I decided to use a mix of sorority, fraternity, band and Kilroy’s shirts in whatever random order they ended up in. I chose only my favorite shirts and went with the twin, double-sided option to maximize the number of shirts.
I will say, I’m incredibly happy with the result! It arrived quickly once my dad shipped the box of panels off, and the stitching was excellent. I use the blanket every day (which is different from my high school t-shirt quilt, which I used only for décor) and I’m not afraid to wash it.
In an effort to be thorough, I will say that there is one thing I didn’t really prefer about Project Repat to having a mom and pop shop do it: it was tough to personalize. I had a lot of shirts with extra-large graphics, or with a small graphic on the front chest and a large graphic on the back. Because Repat is a larger company and understandably has to set tighter restrictions, I couldn’t do what I had with my high school quilt and have different sized panels to fit entire designs, or have the small patches sewn into quilt in their own square. You CAN decide how the panels are organized by laying out all of them, snapping a photo, printing it, and including it in the box!
Overall, I would highly recommend Project Repat, especially if you want the shirts to be made into more of a usable blanket than a decorative quilt! I’ve outlined the process for ordering and receiving the quilt below. If you’re interested in a quilt of your own, go here!
FAQ and Steps to Order!
How many shirts can I use? For single-sided, see below. Wanna go double sided? Double the number below!
Lap - 16 sides of shirts
Twin - 24 sides of shirts
Full - 30 sides of shirts
Queen - 49 sides of shirts
King - 64 sides of shirts
What do I do?
Step 1: Pick your t-shirt quilt blanket size
Step 2: Order your t-shirt quilt blanket (Project Repat can use jerseys, sweatshirts, t-shirts, anything soft!). They will send you information for sending your shirts to them in an email.
Once you order, Project Repat emails you instructions for mailing your t-shirts (including the form to include in the box and the address to ship them off to!)