T Shirt Quilt

I finished middle child's t-shirt quilt this week.  

I had to trim off the excess batting and fabric.  I turned over the outside edge of the bottom layer once, and ran a quick running stitch through the edge.  The fabric was fraying along the cut edges.  Although the entire thing will be encased in fabric, I want to make certain the edges fraying will not lead to the quilts early demise!  I then turned the outside edge over twice, and sewed it down with the machine.

I meant to take pictures of this final step, but I quite honestly forgot to.  Once I got started, I got wrapped up in the moment & didn't remember the camera until it was too late!

What follows are pictures of the final, finished quilt!

Hard to believe, but its finally finished!

More T Shirt Quilt

These are pictures of the black on black squares.

As of this morning, all of the quilting on the right hand side of the quilt is finished! I have the left edge, and two black squares bordering the black edge left to finish!  I might, just might, have this finished in time for Christmas!

I decided to make straight lines, diagonally across the squares.  I could use a fabric marker to show me where to stitch, but since I don't have one on hand, and I don't want to spend any more money than I have to, I'm following along the edge of a ruler.

Diagonal rows.  When they make a quilt, the Amish deliberately make a mistake which is called "The Fear of God".  Legend has it that they believe that only God is perfect, so they deliberately make mistakes.  Look at my quilting, and you'll see a lot of that!  The rows are mostly straight, and mostly go in the same direction!  I'm not willing to pull quilt stitches out- my stitches tend to be small enough that I worry I will damage the fabric if I do pull anything out.  Instead, my interesting lines will be caught for everyone to see - forever....

Starting the cross rows back to male a diamond pattern.  If you look closely at the bottom left corner of the block, you should be able to see two completed rows of diamonds.

More finished block.  Each black block is covered in a diamond grid, much like this.  (Some are a little more unique than others!!)

And that's all.  I estimate that I have about 2 weeks worth of quilting left before I move onto finishing up the edges.  That will be an entirely new challenge!

T - Shirt Quilt

This post originally appeared in my now defunct "Mom's View" blog.  I moved it to this blog at the request of my kids, who wanted to have all of the various posts that accompanied their high school years in one place.  I've matched the publication dates here to their original post date.  If you're reading these posts, I sincerely thank you for taking the time to go back through them all! 

 For middle child's high school graduation, I am making him a t-shirt quilt.

I have amassed a pile of t-shirts from his robotics tournaments and such not over the years, and I have piled them all up into a great, large pile of shirts to make into a quilt to give him when he graduates.  (Yes, it's in less than a month.  Think I could have waited any longer?)

The most important part of making this quilt is to make certain that all of the fabric has been sized, and gone through the washer a couple of times.  I have three new t-shirts for this shirt that he's never worn before, so I've run them all through the washer and dryer several times over the last week, so that they will have shrunk up, much like the older shirts that he's worn many times over that are going into this quilt.

The next step is to cut the shirts up.  That's where I am now.  The shirts have been cut apart, so the arms and backs have been removed.  I have just the fronts, uncut, with the logos and pictures on them. 

I also have the backing from the fabric store.  There is a special backing that is ironed onto the back of the cotton jersey in order to give the fabric stability, so that it won't stretch oddly out of shape when it is sewn together with other t-shirts, or with the cotton squares I'll be using for contrast.

I bought other fabric at the store to tie it all together.  I'm not expecting to have enough shirt fronts to fill an entire quilt, so I am going to alternate blocks of t-shirts with blocks of fabric. 

And now, we arrive at my conundrum.  I have all the t-shirt fronts, but the designs are all different sizes, and I need to find a consistent size that will hold all of the designs so that I can cut the fabric blocks the same size. 

Ahh... Math.  I always wondered when you would rear your ugly head!  If only my math teachers in high school had told me that I'd need to know this in order to do craft projects, I probably would have paid closer attention!

Seriously.  I have a large mat - 36" x 36" for cutting out quilt blocks.  I'll be pulling out the mat later on today, and measuring the designs on all of the shirts and finding the one consistent size that I will need to cut every block.  I'm planning on going for the shirt with the largest design- and then adding an extra inch and half on every side- so that there is a fabric border around the picture, and 1/4" all the way around for seam allowance. 

I'll post the pictures tomorrow.  This promises to be an interesting experience today!