San Francisco Giants Baseball Quilt
I am so thrilled to share my latest craft project, nearly two years in the making! Ever since I married into baseball fandom (thank you Alex), I started bringing my own hobbies to the ballpark. For the entire 2022-2023 MLB season I was knitting the cutest little hexpuff quilt for my friend’s baby. After that quilt was completed, we started on the idea for this t-shirt quilt, for ourselves! Night games in San Francisco are notoriously chilly, thanks to our foggy summers. And since we attend so many games in a year, we always bring our own wool blanket. But of course it would be much more fun to have a themed, one-of-a-kind Giants blanket! Enter, this year’s craft project.
I started scouring Goodwill stores for Giants t-shirts, but they were pretty scarce. I only found two shirts in about a year.
But then it was White Elephant sale to the rescue! Oakland’s White Elephant Sale is an annual benefit for the Oakland Museum of California, and it is the largest, most organized rummage sale I’ve ever shopped. They kindly marked an entire clothing section specifically for Bay Area sports teams! Suddenly I could be picky about which shirts I wanted. Here are two that didn’t make the cut. (We love MadBum but weren’t sure we wanted 9 of him staring at us all the time).
The next year’s White Elephant sale still yielded more wonderful shirts! Each for $3-5.
Finally, after collecting more than enough t-shirts, I took a basic phone photo of all of my shirts along with a ruler for scale so that I could easily make a digital mockup in Photoshop.
First edition photoshop mockup! I went with an ombre color scheme: light on the top left to dark on the bottom right. Also, the bottom row has our three championships (2010, ’12, ’14) and Alex’s and my first year as season ticket members (’21), which was coincidentally a National League Championship year!
Time to go back to the actual shirts and start making some cuts!
I also re-discovered some other shirts that I forgot to include at first, including this orange shirt autographed Brandon Crawford, John Miller, and Austin Slater. JD Davis also signed a different part of the shirt, so I cut it into a couple different pieces to sew together into a square.
Next, cutting squares of interfacing to sew to the back of each t-shirt, just to add stabilization since the shirts are so stretchy.
Square layout! (You might notice the Anchor Brewing raglan that gets replaced by the autograph square). Then I started sewing the squares together, row by row.
Here is each row attached. And then all of the rows attached to each other! Just like that, the t-shirt top of the quilt is complete.
Next, it was time to make the back of the quilt. Fabric shopping at the Discount Fabrics on Cesar Chavez in San Francisco!
I was originally just going to do a plain, solid color for the back of the quilt, but of course I love making things more complicated, so I decided to try making some block letters for the back! I’ve never done this before, but I figured I could reverse engineer it and math it out with some graphing paper. I actually love crafting math. And it worked out great! So satisfying to turn rectangles into letters.
The N was the trickiest since it was the only one that wasn’t sewn at 45°, but it worked! Thank you husband-model!
I realized I had not purchased enough of the backing color, so we went back for more.
My sewing machine also stopped working properly, so I took a break to take it into the shop, which I have never ever done before. The very kind man at Serge-A-Lot in SF told me it was classic user error and I had put the sewing needle in backwards, oops. He extracted all this thread from the innards of the machine. Since it had never been serviced in its entire 30+ year existence, it was probably good to have it serviced anyway!
He had also made this very pretty little sampler to test all of the machine’s built-in functions. Again, very fun! Maybe I should take a sewing class someday. I’ve always been self-taught so there are huge gaps in my skills and knowledge. I’m doing ok with my improvisation though!
Now the letters are attached to the rest of the background. And then I added some red stitches. This is the part that I’m sure had a better technique that I’ll one day realize, but I decided to just hand applique them all on.
A few hours of hand sewing later… Back complete!
Next it was time to quilt the whole thing! The blanket gets sandwiched with the t-shirt front, the cotton batting in the middle, and the Go Giants on the back. Then everything is stitched together with invisible thread on the diagonals of the squares, which creates that classic quilted look. First, I tacked all of the layers together with sticky spray. Then I marked all of the diagonals with a fabric crayon, which will later wash away.
Then I ran into trouble sewing the diagonals with the t-shirts facing up, because the screenpringing material is so sticky, the machine kept on getting stuck and unable to feed the quilt forward. So I ended up then marking the corners with pins and re-drawing all of the guidelines on the back of the quilt. Alas, more obstacles, but it worked out in the end.
Here is the whole quilt, quilted!
Time to trim the edges. And then, time to sew a bunch of strips of the backing material together to make a very very long strip for the border.
I machine-sewed the border to the edges of the quilt front.
Then I flipped the border over to the back and hand-sewed it to the other side, hiding all of those raw edges. I learned this technique from the very excellently written double binding instructions from Purl Soho.
Sewing sewing sewing, DONE!
Thank you for modeling again, Alex!
Then it was time to bring the finished quilt to the ballpark! In our Oracle Park debut, I managed to get my very first foul ball! And we swept the Rockies too, haha. Not bad!
Our finished Giants Quilt, at the home of the Giants! So pleased!
GO GIANTS!
Anna Wu is a wedding and portrait photographer based in San Francisco. She compulsively documents and blogs all of her daily adventures, including visiting all 30 MLB stadiums with her baseball-loving husband Alex. Follow her arts & crafts on instagram @makelearndo and her photography @annawuphoto and view more of her work at annawu.com. Contact her to book your own session today.