30 Before 30: T-shirt blanket

I am absolutely positive that no one is reading this anymore. And I don't blame you! I don't even have an excuse for being this delinquent. But it's important that I don't let my blog lapse. It has been so fun going back over the last 5 years of my life in blog format and I'd like to keep that. I have some fun news and developments to share, but first, I want to blog about a 30 Before 30 that I honestly thought I had already blogged, but I can't seem to find it so here goes:

Make a blanket for my husband out of his old T-shirts 

Late in the fall, I decided that I was just going to go for it and make Taylor a T-shirt blanket. I had no idea where to start, but it turns out that my wonderful cousin, Miranda, is an expert. She told me to gather 16-25 T-shirts (depending on the size blanket I wanted to make. Now, you would think a man would notice when 16 T-shirts go missing, but the thing is, Taylor has so many shirts that he no longer wears but keeps around for sentimental reasons at his parents' house. And his mom was kind enough to bring a whole bag full when we met them in Buffalo, NY for a weekend in October, so I was able to do this pretty much un-detected thanks to that.

Here are the steps required to create the blanket:

1.  Wash and dry the shirts (with a 20-something male, you never know when the last time was that 
2. Cut the T-shirts into squares - For a few, I had to get creative due to the size and position of the T-shirt design
3. Cut strips of fabric to go between the T-shirts (I chose a navy blue cotton)
4. Learn to sew (what, you thought I already had that part down?)
5. Determine the layout of the blanket (I tried to make it balanced to the eye, color-wise)
6. Sew together 4 shirts using three strips of the navy cotton.  Repeat 3 times until I have 4 rows of 4 shirts each
7. Sew together the 4 rows to make a large square (this is just the front of the blanket, the part with the T-Shirts)
8. Sew navy fabric around the outside to make a border
9. Buy flannel backing (I chose red), batting (the stuff that goes inside the blanket to make it warm) and embroidery floss (this will act as baffling to keep the batting from moving around).
10. Wash and dry the flannel backing (to shrink it, get rid of all the fraying, and make it soft!)
11. Sew two pieces of the flannel backing together so that it is big enough to cover the back of the blanket
12. Sew the backing to the T-shirts inside out, leave 12 inches open
13. Flip the blanket right-side out
14. Cut the batting to the size of the blanket
15. Stuff the batting through the hole in the blanket and spread it out so that is completely fills the inside.
16. Sew up the 12 inch hole
17. Knot embroidery thread in the four corners of all 16 shirts to ensure the batting doesn't move.
18. Trim all loose threads
19. TA-DA!!!

Here's the layout of the blanket, top to bottom and left to right:

Row 1: Umbra Manchester United soccer (circa 1997), Zogs Sports (a city sports league we played on in NYC), NYC Half Marathon 2007, that shirt says "New Jersey: Vacation State of the Future"

Row 2: Michigan!, Covenant House (where Taylor worked most recently), Duff Beer (Simpsons reference), Bergen's Best Soccer (One of Taylor's high-school sports highlights)

Row 3: Tenafly Soccer, Chicago Cubs, Map of Indonesia from his time as a Fulbright, Netherlands (This shirt was not a T-shirt, but actually a SLEEVELESS shirt...you can see why it ended up in a blanket!)

Row 4: Rites of Spring (Vanderbilt music festival that Taylor planned), Teach For America, Vanderbilt!, another Bergen's Best.

And here's a video of Taylor opening the blanket.  I looked forward to this for WEEKS because I knew it would be a big surprise.