T Shirt Quilt

I know.  I'm slow.  I think I only get inspired when it's warm outside!!

I decided to help a friend out the other month and make a t-shirt quilt for her daughter's graduation.  Amazingly, she did half the battle, I'm just the seamstress.  Below is the process I used after looking up many other sites and blogs and how-to-s for t-shirt quilts.

Materials:

• Rotary cutter, mat, straight edge
• Cardboard for template
• Lifetime worth of t-shirts
• Sewing machine
• Thread
• Straight pins
• Fabric piece large enough to match the size of the quilt (or piece-meal)
• Roll of quilting batting (can buy at any fabric store; I bought a roll for king size)

1.  Pick your shirts.  You may need to be choosy or you're going to have an extra extra king-sized quilt!  This one happens to have 56 shirts.  I suggest you use a cardboard template of some kind (including a seam allowance!) - that keeps everything nice and tidy and straight.  Make sure you choose shirts with designs smaller than the template so nothing gets cut off.

2.  Cut your shirts.  While scissors are wonderful, rotary cutters are superb!!  Following the template, working on a mat, using a rotary cutter makes a smooth cut and is fast and easy.

3.  Iron on fusible webbing.  Doing this makes the shirts stretch a bit less while sewing.  Cut to fit after ironing.

Fusible webbing - your friend

4.  Pin squares together to make rows and sew.  This is where it starts to get easy!!  I think making the design may take some time, but if you're going for true quilt, just put it together any old way!!  I sewed each square of a row together, and did every row separately like that. 

Part of a row.  No, I didn't mess up my sewing - it's just not completely unfolded.  !!

5.  Iron seams of rows.  Take each row and iron the seams down.  You may need to trim off some excess fabric/fusing that sticks out. 

6.  Sew rows together.  I had a whole assembly line going on - after I ironed seams of a row, I then lined it up (front sides facing each other - be careful!!  I spent a whole 45 minutes seam ripping last night, and my neck hurts now!), pinned two rows together, then sewed.  Then I ironed the next row of seams, pinned, and sewed to the blanket and so on.  This made for a fast easy process!

It's huge!!  It takes up about half of my basement...

7.  Sew back fabric.  For me, my quilt turned out to be a smidgen larger than queen size, which made it a bit hard to find fabric wide enough to fit. So I had to buy twice as much fabric, sew it together, then trim off excess in the end.

8.  Trim back fabric and batting to fit size of quilt.

9.  Pin all three pieces together (batting, then back fabric, then t-shirts picture side facing in) and sew all but a portion of the bottom.  Turn inside out (or outside in)  :)  and hand sew the remaining opening.

10.  In the end mine felt a little loose in the middle, so I decided to sew french knots through all three layers here and there (corners of t-shirts) for some added security.

And you are done (and so am I!!)

To me this wasn't that hard of a project.  I rather liked it.  It's really gotten me into sewing and quilting.  My next step is a quilted clutch.  Instructions and pics coming soon!!!