To be honest, I do wear a lot of my race shirts. I have a super laid back dress code at work which allows me to wear my race shirt mostly every day. However, I cannot possibly wear them ALL! There are some that are too big or too small, heavy cotton that I don't particularly like to wear, designs that just aren't me, or ones that have precious memories so I don't want the shirt to get ruined. The ones that don't get worn often go into storage tubs after a few months where they just sit and never get seen again. Yes, I know I could donate them, but they all have special memories to me and I can't seem to let them go.
One of my goals the past few weeks has been to simplifying my life and de-cluttering. Well, I don't want to just throw out or donate these shirts, so what better way to preserve the memories and repourpose them than to create a t-shirt quilt with them. Well, I am crafty, but not a great sewer or quilter, so I turned it over to the professionals at Project Repat.
The first step of the Project Repat process is to decide what size quilt you want. The options are lap-sized, twin, full, queen, or king. Each size has it's own number of shirts needed, for my twin-sized quilt I would be needing 24 shirt panels (each panel being a 12"x12" square). You also need to decide on the color of the fleece backing that you want (navy blue, orchid, light blue, gray, red, black, or grey). Since I am pretty basic and knew that my shirts I would be selecting vary in colors, I opted for black.
In celebration of my upcoming 100th half marathon, I thought it would be fun to dedicate my new quilt to my half marathon memories. Over the past few years I traveled to some pretty awesome places, ran some AMAZING races, ran some PRs and had a few so bad it is comical races.
The 24 single-side shirts and order information sheet fit into a medium flat rate box perfectly and was ready for shipment. Upon purchasing your Project Repat quilt, you receive an address to ship your shirts to based on your location. For my shirts coming from metro-Atlanta, I was shipping to a North Carolina facility to be processed.
From the moment that I received my shipment notification I was stalking the tracking information (and perhaps my mailman). I couldn't wait for my beautiful quilt to arrive! Well, after two days of stalking it was HERE! Ok, here we go....let's see what they did! Without further wait, I present to you my new Project Repat race tshirt quilt!
The fleece backing of my quilt is so warm and soft. To be honest, I was nervous about having a fleece back to my quilt as I am not a big fan of fleece - I find it the feel of it to be gross and often scratchy. Well, to my surprise, I was instantly loving the PolarTec fleece that is used for the backing. It was WAY better than I could have expected and I was beyond pleased with it.
There are so many different stories to be told from my Project Repat quilt. Some of my favorites on my quilt include my first trip to New Orleans (Rock n Roll New Orleans), first runDisney race (Princess Half Marathon), and the time I took a 13.1 mile tour of Washington DC with some amazing girlfriends (Nike Women's Half Marathon DC).
Do you have tubs of shirts that are exploding? Want to use your favorite race shirt to create a blanket of memories? I highly recommend checking out Project Repat for your next t-shirt quilt. Be sure to sign up for their mailing list and follow them on social media for great discounts and promotions throughout the year!