GINORMOUS T-shirt Quilt DONE!

Things I learned from this project:
#1 - Don't expect to finish a quilt of this size in a week.   (Although it only took  me a little over a week with no sleep)
#2 - King size T-quilts take not 1, not 2, but THREE packages of fusible.  That's 30 yards.
#3 - Dont even think about trying to take a photo without at least 2 other people helping you ;c)
#4 - You're going to need more than just a queen sized bed surface to lay out your shirts and graph them!

Here are all the shirts, ready to be cut, fused, and sewn!

 In order to lay out all the shirts and graph them, I had to lay out the shirts sideways on my queen-sized bed. I put a table on one side, and some laundry hampers turned upside down on the other side. ;c)

 Just graphing a little less than half the quilt took me a whole day.

 Here's the whole quilt graphed:

 The quilt TOP finished, hung up sidedways on my design wall.   all 85" x 95" of it.

 A curious thing happens when I'm finished with the top:   This is the same box that all the shirts came neatly packed in.  The box was FULL when it got to me.  Now that the top is done, the box is full, OVERFLOWING actually . . with those same T-shirt SCRAPS.  One of my friends says this breaks some law of physics or something.   LOL

 And finally, the finished quilt.   Thank you to my helpers:  James (my hubs) and Mark (my mom's hubs) ;c)

A closer look: 

Some notable things about this quilt/project:  

 This quilt was for a teacher who was retiring.  All the fellow teachers got together, signed the shirts, and had them made into a quilt.  This "SISTERS" block was made because they refer to each other as "sisters."   I took some sparkly cream fabric, and using raw-edge fusible applique, stitched the letters on top.  The letters were made using one of the shirt scraps.  I like how much depth the T-shirt material gives to applique.

 One of the lady's made a cross-stitch and signed it and included that into a quilt.  I LOVED this cross-stitch!  I hate to pick favorites but this probably WAS my favorite block.   I quilted my squigglies AROUND the block, but didn't want to quilt over top of her beautiful hand stitches. ;c)  Now I wish I had gotten a better photo of it.

 Look at all of these SET-IN Seams!!!!   I have a choice to make when making these T-shirt quilts:  I can hurry up and graph them, not paying any mind to whether the seams are Set-in or not, and do the work LATER, when I'm actually sewing the pieces together.   ~or~  I can take my time graphing it, and try my best to AVOID set-in seams, so the stitching goes faster later.  
On this quilt, I chose to hurry up and graph it.   Another thing is, I actually LIKE the way the set-in seams look.  It makes the finished quilt look more like a puzzle and less "block"-y.

 This is the teacher who is retiring I believe.   They had her photo printed on a T-shirt at walmart.  

 This next block is interesting because it was a baby onesie.  Instead of unsewing (ripping out) all the seams on the onesie, I just appliqued the front area to a white background.   One of the t-shirts used in another area of the quilt was almost the exact same weight/material as the onesie so I just used that as the background.   Also, in the process, one of the ladybug's eyeballs came undone.  I had to restitch both of his eyeballs because I didn't have exact matching thread.  So one eyeball would have been darker than the other if I didn't do both of them over.  LOL

So that's it!!!   My biggest quilt to date is my Carolina Christmas which is 90" x 90"  This quilt is 85" x 95" So I would say it's a tie!   

 It wasn't difficult to quilt thanks to my Juki Industrial machine, but unfortunately couldn't do anything really "fancy" with the quilting because of the size.   This quilt is so sentimental, and has enough differences in color and pattern, it really doesn't need a whole lot "extra" anyway.