How to Use Neon T-shirts in Your T-shirt Quilt

Neon has a purpose and that is to stand out. That’s why safety equipment is colored neon.

That same principle applies to a neon T-shirt in a quilt. It will stand out! There is no way to make a neon T-shirt block quiet. If there is just one neon T-shirt, this is where your eyes will go every time you look at the quilt.

And neon is not just yellow. There is neon pink, orange and green. The principle here that apply to neon T-shirts apply to all colors of neon.

The question is then what do you do with a neon T-shirt slated to be in a T-shirt quilt? You need to decide how you want it used.

Three Options When Including a Neon T-shirt in a Quilt:

1. Balance

This is the most typical method we use. When you don’t mention anything about your neon T-shirt(s), this is how we handle them.

Your neon T-shirt will be cut as we would any other T-shirt. We save the leftover blank T-shirt material from this T-shirt. We use this material for small fillers placed throughout your quilt. This balances the bright neon color.  

Since there is more than one block of the bright color, your eye will not get pulled right to that one block. As a result, the neon becomes less of a focal point.

This is as close to “hiding” a neon block as we can get. Rather than hiding, it’s more of a move to down play the neon. Your eye will always see the neon first. There is nothing we can do to change that. What we can do is combat it by adding additional neon blocks.

Downside: If the neon T-shirt isn’t one of your favorites you will have extra squares of it.

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2. Eliminate

What if you don't like the look of neon fillers used to balance out your neon T-shirt block? The best option is for you to eliminate the neon T-shirt(s) altogether. Just don’t send them.

What else could you do with one, two or more neon T-shirts you don’t want in a quilt? You can have them made into a pillow.  It would be a pillow that would be difficult to misplace!

In this example here, we refuse to put the neon T-shirts in the Texas quilt. It would have looked awful. So we pulled out the neon T-shirts and made a pillow. You can see how much the pillow and the quilt clash with each other. 

Read more about having a pillow made here.

Here’s information about having a pillow made from just one T-shirt.

Or keep wearing them.

3. Highlight

Love that neon T-shirt? Let it be the focal point of your quilt. We can highlight it by placing it in a prominent place. This way, each time you look at your quilt, your eye will begin at this particular T-shirt.  Just let us know if your neon is the favorite T-shirt so we can highlight it even more than it already is!

Conclusion

You have three options with your neon T-shirt – balance, eliminate or highlight.  If you don’t specify what option you would like, we will balance that neon throughout the quilt so it doesn’t stand out – as much.

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More Photos of T-shirt Quilts With Neon T-shirts: