It is hard to work in Infosec for very long and not amass a huge number of T-shirts. Vendors give them away like candy thinking that somehow a free t-shirt is going to make you spend thousands of dollars on their blinky light solution versus their competitors blinky light solution. However, some t-shirts tend to have a great value than others. Those shirts emblazoned with logos from projects or companies that you actually worked with tend to have the most value. Then the question becomes what do you do with them?
For me, for the last twenty years or so, my most valuable t-shirts lived in a plastic box under my bed. I never wore them, because, well, I don’t wear t-shirts much and these were a little too valuable to me to risk them fading due to over use. And so they stayed in the box, seldom seen.
A few years ago I ran across a company offering to make a quilt out of old T-shirts. I thought this was a great idea! And the price was pretty inexpensive to. I almost sent my shirts in immediately but for some reason I hesitated. I started Googling and found there is more than one company making quilts out of T-shirts and way more than one way to do it. I knew nothing about fabric design or quilting, backing material, batting, stitch length, binding, etc.. Evidently there is a quite a bit that goes into a quilt and I only had one copy of many of my T-shirts. I didn’t want to risk going with a low cost option simply because it was low cost.
In the end I chose Too Cool T-Shirt Quilts. I boxed up my shirts and sent them in. They emailed me as soon as they got the box and asked me what sort of options I waned, how big of a border, any designs in the quilting, special positioning of certain shirts, etc.. 2 weeks later they sent me these photos.
I was pretty impressed. It looked great, especially the quilting design that showed through the back. My whole purpose for getting the quilt though was to hang it on the wall in my office at home. I ordered a custom quilt hanger from Robinson’s Wood Crafts. This allows you to hang a quilt on the wall without putting holes in the quilt itself.
If you have a box of valuable T-shirts taking up space under your bed you might consider getting a quilt made, but do your own research, the cheapest option may not be the best one for you and your T-Shirts.