Part of my original business plan included making t-shirt quilts. I put out a call for t-shirts and had several takers. My second cousin in Arizona sent me her box right before the end of the school year hit the fan. I had warned her that it would probably be a little while until I got to them-she may not have anticipated quite the entire month of June.
I started last Monday working on her t-shirts and finished up today. She had cut some of the shirts already so I was unable to do my original design I had in place for t-shirt quilts. What I ended up doing to accommodate all the different sizes of shirts was I cut all the shirts on 3 inch intervals. I had 3"x3", 3"x6", 12"x12", 9"x12", etc t-shirts to work with to form a quilt.
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| The t-shirts on my improvised design wall. |
I laid all the cut t-shirts on my bed and went to work rearranging them until I had a pleasing square quilt. I had a few gaps where there were not t-shirts that fit and no left over t-shirts to put in those places. So in those spots I put squares and rectangle cuts of the border fabric. I pieced them together having to use partial seams with several of the more unusual sized t-shirts. Partial seams were not nearly as bad as I remember them being. I then went to work on the border. Since I didn't need to put sashings into the quilt because of it's neat design I spent a little extra time making a very exciting border. I assembled the pieces and added them onto the quilt.
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| Ready to go. |
I loaded the quilt onto the longarm and got busy using a free motion design that I love. My double bubble design is becoming my favorite design to quilt when I'm not using a pattern and just going free motion. It's easy and relaxing.
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| Ready & waiting to get started on the longarm. |
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| A close up of my double bubble design I like to free motion on the longarm. |
I pulled the quilt off the longarm and added the binding. I chose instead of hand sewing the binding down to machine sew it down this time. It worked out well as I've never done that before and believe that will be my go-to binding strategy for t-shirt quilts.
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| The final product, it measures about 70 X 85 . |
