Summer Adventures, Stitched Together: Creating a T-Shirt Quilt from Your Travels

It’s summertime! The sun is out, the weather’s warm, the days are long and there’s more time than ever for family fun. You probably have so many fun trips and activities planned for this summer, and no doubt in past summers you’ve made even more memories that have lasted a lifetime. Summer is special in all of these ways and more. It’s a season where we all can really spread our wings and flourish!

So, how do we capture the essence of our summer memories? Photo libraries and videos are of course a start. There’s also plenty of souvenirs and t-shirts that we all collect along the road as we visit exciting new travel destinations, explore summer camps and witness jaw-dropping concerts and events. Collections of these summer souvenirs can gather quickly, so how can they best be presented and preserved?

In today’s blog, let’s take a look at why transforming your summer souvenir t-shirts into your own custom t-shirt quilt is the best way to preserve these sunny memories for years to come.

AROUND THE WORLD ON A QUILT

Travel is often the highlight of summer for many families. Whether you’ve all piled into the car for a great American road trip, flown to an exotic foreign locale or day-tripped to a favorite nearby landmark, your family will have plenty of stories to tell for each adventure. Those of us who have the travel bug like to wear it proudly – and our collections of t-shirts from our most favorite spots speak for themselves!

T-shirts from all over the country and world can stack up quickly, summer after summer. At a certain point, some are bound to wind up in the back of closets or deep in a storage box. These shirts represent special moments of vacations and travel destinations, and you want to hold on to those memories together – or even share those stories of your adventures with those closest to you. Luckily, on a t-shirt quilt you can savor all of your shirts in one spot.

Your travel t-shirt quilt can be a collage to your greatest adventures across the globe. Think of it as a trophy case of your achievements in globe trotting, as if you were Indiana Jones or a famous adventurer! These stories of travel are an important element of who we are because they give us the wonderful experience of breaking from our everyday norms and finding new appreciation for the world around us. And, of course, you can brag to all your friends about all the cool places you’ve been!

MEMORIES COLLECTED FROM OVER THE YEARS

Beyond simply capturing a list of places you’ve visited, think about the memories associated with each one of those locations and how they’ve affected you. Our experiences of travel can be deeply moving on a number of levels and affect the decisions we make for the rest of our lives. Work, passions and hobbies can be discovered or given a whole fresh, new life after some much needed time spent away from home.

When you think about how travel has personally affected you, you may find even more ways to approach creating a travel t-shirt quilt. A passion for a hobby may have ignited from a trip – perhaps a newfound obsession with soccer after a trip abroad to England or a discovery of a new band you encountered overseas. So, even though you may not have collected souvenir t-shirts from every specific travel destination, other shirts or clothes you own may very well likely link beautifully into the stories of your travels without ever having realized it.

DESIGNED TO TELL YOUR ADVENTUROUS TALES

Lastly, it’s time to think of the layout and design of your t-shirt quilt. Selecting which shirts to include in your travel t-shirt quilt, of course, is the perfect place to start, but then comes the fun of how to layout the shirts to design your quilt. Here are a few tips you can keep in mind to help:

• Color Coordination: Don’t feel like you need to be an artist to make your quilt look pretty! Pair together shirts on the layout that appeal to you. Shirts that are similar shades can look great grouped together or can create an exciting contrast when spread out. You can even highlight a favorite shirt by placing it next to dramatically different colors. Play with fun color patterns and you can’t go wrong!

• Graphics: Do your shirts have large logos, small icons or something in between? Try to balance your shirts’ visually so that your quilt doesn’t feel lopsided with graphics. You can even play around with pairing graphic shirts to form larger patterns – just like we do with traditional quilt blocks.

• Themed Sections: Think about the story you want to tell and how to put your shirts in sections to tell that story. Perhaps the quilt can order the t-shirts chronologically from left-to-right depending on when the trip was taken. Or maybe you have a favorite location t-shirt you want smack-dab in the middle while your other trips radiate out from the center. Or you could even treat your quilt like a map and organize the shirts depending on where each location is respectively to each other geographically! Have fun thinking of all the different stories you can tell just with your t-shirts!

CAPTURE YOUR SUMMER FUN FOREVER

When the summer travel ends, the fun is just beginning! Take out your t-shirts from your favorite past travels, get started collecting fantastic t-shirts from your new 2025 summer hot-spots and start planning your glorious travel t-shirt quilt. Tell the story of all of your favorite places you and your family have visited while also telling the story of how those journeys have made you into who you are today. Your t-shirt quilt will capture those memories so you can make room for even more!

Your travel t-shirt quilt is also the best companion for future adventures!

To get started crafting the perfect summer travel t-shirt quilt, check out MemoryStitch’s collection of t-shirt quilts and keepsakes here. Then, to learn more about our entire process of transforming your precious summer shirts into a beautiful stitched keepsake, take a look at our How It Works page. And for more on everything MemoryStitch and t-shirt quilts – including limited time sales and deals – follow us on Facebook and Instagram. We can’t wait to hear about all your wonderful adventures! 

Written by Zander Gibney.