First of all, gather up all the shirts you were about to give to goodwill and grab a pair of fabric scissors. In general, it’s best to use only shirts that are regular cotton or cotton/poly. Stretchy stuff will throw off the design and make the sewing bit more fiddly.

Find the smallest shirt in your pile and cut off the bottom hem, the sleeves, and the collar and top seams. Cut the biggest square/rectangle you can get out of the front and back of the shirt. Try to cut square to the grain of the shirt. This can be a little tricky on some older shirts that have been twisted and stretched from years of wear and washing, but just do your best. This first square you cut is your template for all the others. You can either just use it to trace around, or you can make a cardboard template the same size and use that.

Now cut off the bottom hems, sleeves, collars, and top hems of all your other shirts and cut squares out of the fronts and backs of all of them using your template piece as a guide. You can trace around it with a pencil or fabric chalk or whathaveyou, or you can just lay the first fabric square you cut on top of each shirt piece and cut around it. Like I said, I don’t get too specific with this project, so be as fussy as you think you need to be.

Now you’ve got a stack of fabric squares that are roughly the same size, you get to decide the size of your blanket. You can make it as small or large as you want. It mostly depends on how many tshirts you end up with. My biggest one is 6 rows of 5. It’s also my favorite, partially because it’s got the most nostalgia attached to it (There are a lot of favorite shirts in that blanket, particularly the Ben Folds Five one that I literally wore til it was falling to pieces. I still mourn the loss of that shirt.) and partially because since most of the shirts were well-worn before I cut them, they’re extremely soft, and thus perfect for a blanket.

My favorite. It's enormous! I couldn't even fit it all in one picture. Poor BF5 shirt, I wish you were still wearable.

In any case, clear a big space on the floor and start laying out your blanket. Once you perfect your pattern of tshirt pieces, you’re ready to start sewing. It’s easiest to sew each row together first. So starting with the top row, take your first two squares (from left to right) and lay them right sides together. You can pin down the side where the seam will be (recommended if you don’t sew often) or you can be a bad example like me and not bother. Sew down the side with a seam allowance of about half an inch (or whatever you’re comfortable with, you can always cut off the excess later if you feel you need more space). Open up the squares, take the next square in the row and lay it right sides together with the square to the right of your first seam, pin if you like, then sew down the right side again. Keep doing this til you get to the end of the row, then repeat with each row of your layout.

You should now have your sewn-together rows of tshirt squares laid out on the floor. Sewing the rows together involves slightly longer seams, so I do actually pin when I’m doing this bit because it’s easier to keep it all together. Starting with your top two rows, flip the second row up and lay it face down on top of the top row (so that the bottom edge of the top row is matched up with the top edge of the second row). Smooth out and try to match up the seams between the squares in each row if you can, then pin about every 2 inches (on the bottom edge of top row/top edge of second row side). Sew this the same way you sewed between each individual square. Now open these rows up, flip the third row up and lay it facedown on the second row, and repeat the same process. Do the same for each following row in your blanket until you’ve sewed the entire front of your blanket together.

For the back of the blanket, I always use tshirt sheets. I don’t generally use the flat sheet when I make my bed, so I would just go to Target and buy a set of tshirt sheets, use the fitted one and save the flat one for projects like this. My favorite tshirt blanket uses two twin sized sheets sewn together on the back because it’s so big, but if you can find a flat sheet the same size as your finished front, that’s the easiest. You don’t even have to use a tshirt sheet, you can use a regular one you’ve got lying around. It really just depends on how you want the thing to feel in the end. Make sure you wash and dry the flat sheet before you start sewing it. Especially if it’s a new one. I didn’t do this once and ended up with a slightly deformed tshirt blanket because the back shrunk in the wash when it was already sewn together. Not a huge deal, but it can be easily avoided.

The back is not nearly as exciting.

Lay your flat sheet out on the floor and lay the completed front of your blanket facedown on top of it. Make sure it’s as flat and smoothed out as you can get it, then trim any extra off the flat sheet. Pin around the outside about once every two inches, pick the whole thing up, and pick a corner to start sewing from. Make sure you backstitch on the first corner. Give yourself at least a half inch seam allowance and sew down each side of the blanket until you get about half a tshirt square length from the corner where you started, then backstitch again. (Don’t get excited and sew the thing all the way shut, because then you’ll just have an inside out blanket.) Now pull the blanket rightside out through the hole you’ve left, tuck in the extra seam, and topstitch it closed, backstitching at the beginning and end of the seam.

You could get fancy and topstitch around the entire edge of the blanket, or you could even put binding on if you want to take it further, but this is the point at which I say ‘finished!’ and wrap myself up in my new blanket.

These make great guest blankets, picnic blankets, throws, and are great for dorm rooms. Best of all, they’re a valid rescue for your most loved shirts that either don’t fit anymore or are threatening to disintegrate from over-wear.