The best way to sort T-shirts for a quilt is to group them by story. Sort them chronologically, topically, geographically, by color, or by another system that makes sense for your shirts. The goal is to keep unrelated T-shirts out of the quilt so the finished quilt feels organized and meaningful.
Your T-shirts Tell a Story
It may be the story of your life or of your trip to Europe. It's important to take a little time to sort through your T-shirts before you have a quilt made.
Your T-shirts should all be part of the same story. Including a T-shirt that doesn't belong can change the story your quilt tells.
For example, it is important not to mix in T-shirts that are not related to the topic of your quilt. Let's say that you ran in 15 marathons this year. Those 15 T-shirts tell a story. It would be inappropriate to add one or two concert T-shirts from 1985 with the marathon T-shirts. It just does not make sense.
So, you have a huge pile of T-shirts and you know you want or will need more than one quilt. At this point, you need to sort out your T-shirts into groupings for one or more quilts and/or pillows.
Here are a number of ways to sort your T-shirts into logical groupings.
Sort Your T-shirts Chronologically
Sort your T-shirts into time periods. For example, if you are working with a child graduating from high school, you could sort out items into a number of different groupings…
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1 quilt - birth – high school graduation
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2 quilts - birth – 8th grade, high school
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5 quilts - First year, ages 1 – 5, elementary school, middle school and high school
For an adult, you can sort before and after a significant date. For example, before and after 2000. Or before and after getting married.
Sort Your T-shirts by Topic
Look at the different topics represented in your stack of T-shirts. Perhaps you're graduating from college and have T-shirts from athletics, student organizations, and campus events. You could combine them into one quilt about your college years or divide them into separate quilts based on different activities.
Another example is T-shirts you have collected from restaurants. First sort them into the individual restaurants or restaurants vs. bars. You might find that you have 25 Hard Rock Café (HRC) and 4 Planet Hollywood T-shirts. You don’t want to mix those 4 Planet Hollywood T-shirts into the HRC T-shirts. They don’t belong. And they will lower the future value of your T-shirt quilt.
You might not care about this now, but sometime down the line someone might. Imagine a future auction of your quilt. An all HRC T-shirt quilt will draw in those hard-core HRC lovers and there might be a bidding war. But if those 4 Planet Hollywood T-shirts are in the quilt, the HRC purist won’t bother.
Those 4 Planet Hollywood T-shirts could be made into a great pillow.
Sort Your T-shirts by Location
If you have moved around and traveled a lot, sorting your T-shirts geographically might be the way to approach dividing them up.
For example, you might make one quilt from T-shirts collected throughout the United States and another from your international travels.
If you have moved around a lot, you might choose to put all the T-shirts that you got while you lived in New York in one quilt, and the T-shirts you got while living in Texas in the other quilt.
Read more about planning a travel T-shirt quilt here.
Sort Your T-shirts by Color
So you have a stack of Harley-Davidson (HD) T-shirts sitting there. It’s a huge stack and will need to be made into two quilts. If you are like most HD T-shirt collectors, the majority of your T-shirts will be black.
A great way to sort the stack would be into an all-black quilt and then the colored and white T-shirts, along with some of the remaining black T-shirts would go into a separate quilt. This would help balance the non-black T-shirts with the majority of black T-shirts.
We have done this a number of times with great success. Read more about Harley Davidson T-shirt quilts - they are awesome!
Other Ways to Sort Your T-shirts for a Quilt
You might find that combining several sorting methods works best. For example, if you end up with five stacks of T-shirts but only want two quilts, send us your sorted and labeled shirts. We can calculate the size of each group and help you figure out which combinations will work best.
We can help you sort your stack of T-shirts, but we don’t know the stories behind your T-shirts. You only have one chance to get it right, so take some time and consider your possibilities.
Want to learn more about T-shirt quilts? Visit our Learning Center.
We have over 200 articles about all aspects of T-shirt quilts.
