In the Making: T-Shirt Quilt

I’m in the process of making a t-shirt quilt, well, two.  One for my husband and one for my friend.

I’ve made a few t-shirt quilts and I wasn’t an avid researcher/googler until recently so, when I sewed something... I made it up.  Now that we live in a world of a busy facebook full of any group you need to find peers to ask questions directly to, youtube where someone has already uploaded at least one video on how to do something, and google brimming with blogs and websites of people who have already made all the mistakes so you don’t have to… I still make it up a lot as I go… lol BUT I do go and ask questions or search for a topic if I’m truly stumped and my made up solution doesn’t work.

There are some important steps to accomplishing a successful t-shirt quilt and one of those steps is interfacing.  What’s interfacing?  It’s this awesome thing that can be used in a lot of different ways.  It’s often used in clothing situations like collars or cuffs where you want it to remain stiff and hold its shape while in use.  It’s also used in t-shirt quilts to take some of the stretch out of the t-shirt and make it act closer to quilting cotton.

When I made my first t-shirt quilt for my first born, I had this brilliant idea to cut up all her clothes I loved and couldn’t part with or were stained and couldn’t trade in at my local kid to kid.  But I didn’t use interfacing… the issue was I used a straight stitch to sew the clothing pieces together to make a coin quilt.  As the quilt got washed and used, the t-shirt material stretched and since the straight stitch doesn't stretch... the seams very quickly broke and I began to notice gaping holes in my precious quilt I had spent so much time on.  The solution is to use fusible interfacing on the shirts before you cut and sew them.

Another thing I like to do is instead of sewing shirt to shirt together I like to use an actual cotton woven or quilting cotton as sashing in between the blocks, not only does it frame the blocks nicely (in my opinion), but I feel like it gives some more stability to the t-shirt blocks so that hopefully the quilt can stand up against the test of time and last for many many years to come.

Now to the first steps of a t-shirt quilt

Step 1.  Take your stack of t-shirts and dismember them.  I like to follow the side seams and cut up the sides and following through the sleeve.  Then, cutting along the shoulder seams through the sleeve to separate the front from the back.  If there’s images on both sides, I save both, if there’s only an image on one side, I save that side and toss the blank side.  You can save the blank sides, interface, and cut them for your sashing if you want to, I don’t usually do that, but it’s your quilt, you can make up whatever you want to do and see if it works or how you like it.

Step 2. Take your newly dismembered shirts and decide on a block size.  For the quilt for my friend I decided on two sizes, 6X6 inches for the smaller front images and 16X16 inches for the larger images on the backs.  For my husband’s quilt, he had a few other sized images and to make it work in fitting it all in there’s a lot of different sizes.  One block is 16X21 inches, Some are 16X16 some are 14X16, some are 15X16 and I also have some 6X6 blocks to throw in the mix.  It’s a little more missed matched and hopefully it doesn’t bother him too much, but for his I cared more about lining up corners for a good framing of the largest block vs have a consistent block size.  

Step 3. Fusible interfacing.  There’s a lot of different thicknesses of interfacing.  I really like the sheerweight fusible interfacing or also the shirtailor fusible interfacing, both from pellon.  What I like to do is cut out the sizes I need at least an inch larger than what I actually need so there’s room to cut and have the entire block backed with the interfacing.  I like to find the center of the image on the shirt and the center on the square or whatever shape of the interfacing so I can line it up.  Then follow the instructions for adhering the interfacing to the shirt.

Step 4.  Cut your blocks.  I like to so my best to center the image on the block, some times it’s not always something I can do, but I try to center it the best I can and cut the blocks to the size I decided.  

After that it’s all about layout, deciding on sashing width, size of blanket, sewing, etc.