I was going through boxes of clothes that are slated for a garage sale or thrift store donation and I came across many many promotional t-shirts. Shirts that one of us got as swag from courses we took, give aways at trade shows or to wear while volunteering. The neat thing was how many different colours of shirts there were.
I usually end up cutting up the promotional shirts for rags, sometimes keeping a square of the shirt if the event was memorable. My intention is to one day sew those squares into a quilt.
All those different colours of shirts had my mind instantly thinking of meeples. Meeples are game pieces that tend to be game characters in board games. They come in many different colours often representing each person playing the game.
Instead of cutting up the shirts, I decided to try to make a pillow with the them instead. My husband had cut a Meeple shape out of a piece of pine in the fall with the intention of potentially making a cutting board. I used it to roughly trace out a Meeple on the lid of a Costco pizza box. It was almost as big as the box lid. I did some erasing and reworking the head, arms and legs until I was satisfied with the shape. After cutting it out it looked like this.
The next step was prepping a shirt. The shirt I used was a Fire Smart shirt that was too small for anyone and the neck was very tight. I cut into it at the neckline and cut off the small logo on the front of the shirt. I also cut up one of the sides of the shirt to open it up. This gave me both the front and back of the shirt to work with.
I laid the cardboard Meeple onto the back and front of the shirt to make sure it still fit after cutting out the logo and it was fine. The back had some writing at the very top of the shirt but it left enough of the shirt to work with. I was glad I didn’t need another shirt because black is an odd colour to match after many washes. I used a white dressmaker pencil to trace around the cardboard.
It was so faint that I decided to use chalk to trace on the front side of the shirt.
Using the front and back of the shirt, I ended up with two t-shirt material meeples.
They were quite wrinkly from being in a storage box, and I was throwing a load of clothes in the dryer, so I tossed them in to get the wrinkles out.
While they were in the dryer, I used my cutting mat and material cutter wheel to cut 2” strips from the leftover pieces of shirt. My intention was to sew together enough of these 2” strips to go all the way around the outside of the Meeple shape. I wanted the pillow to be flat not bulging.
I used a piece of string, guiding it along the edges of the cardboard figure, to figure out how long my 2” strip would need to be. I measured 62” but decided to make sure the strip was a bit longer just in case. I would just cut off the end if there was extra.
I sewed together the strips making sure the sewn edges were all on the same side.
I then started sewing the edge onto one of the Meeple shapes. I was doing this all by hand so it took a while. I would suggest that you mark your Meeple shapes before starting maybe with a safety pin. It was hard to figure out which way to lay the second shape after having already sewn the first to the edging. I had a 50/50 chance it was right but, of course, my luck was not good. The shape, when flipped was slightly askew. Not enough that I would rip it apart but definitely not as lined up as I would have liked. I left about a 2” space after sewing the second side, turned it right side out, filled it with fiberfill and sewed it shut.
For my second Meeple pillow I used two summer camp t-shirts. The large logo on these made the fronts unusable. I had some long red ribbing material from my mom already in strips that I decided to use for the edge. I was able to add about a 1/2” to the width of the strip and only needed to sew together two pieces. I lined up the Meeple shapes correctly this time and was much more pleased with the outcome.
Here are the two together. My husband insisted on adding one of his stained glass hearts.
We have more shirts for me to make meeples with. Royal blue, orange, pink, grey and white will be next but I will have to try to find some Kelly green and bright yellow shirts. Oddly, the two missing colours are the ones that my husband and I would normally pick when playing a game.
My plan for our future games room would be to have them sitting on the chairs. People would pick their colour by choosing their seat and could then use their meeple as a back rest.
Fun idea!