Hawaiian Shirt Quilt for My Dear Husband

Last summer, my DH and I redid our master closet. Or was that a year ago? As part of the redo, my DH went through his clothes and got rid of some things. He doesn't typically get rid of anything, so I was very excited.

Part of his "discard" pile were old Hawaiian style shirts. They were old in the sense that parts of them were falling apart and he was no longer able to wear them to work. As we looked at them, I noticed they were 100% cotton...and we both thought - why not make a quilt???!!

So, I found a pattern that I thought would work well with lots of different patterns - his shirts were a mixture of fish/fishing related and cars... I made some test blocks with a red accent color but the red really was the focal point which was not what I (we) wanted. I tried a gray and that worked perfectly. The quilt went together quickly and I showed a lot of people the "in progress" quilt.

Here's the finish:

It's lap sized (66 x 77) and we think good for watching tv. The only problem? The cat LOVES it and it's already full of cat hair and so my DH won't use it. It's ok - I know he will eventually and he could always wash it too...here's a close up of the center portion:

See? Cars and fish (or sharks in this case)!

The back is a quilt I was working on called "Scrappy Many Trips Around the World" or something like that. It's a free pattern from Bonnie Hunter of Quiltville. She has lots of great free patterns on her website...and I have a couple of her books. She does tons of scrap quilts. Anyway....so here's the back:

The quilting is called "water" (I think). Here's a close up of the back and quilting:

After trimming and binding this quilt, I kept the "scraps" of the back. I've used them as backings for other things afterwards and I actually have a couple of pieces that I'm going to make into a larger piece for a small table topper quilt I'm working on.