If you recall my post about the t-shirt quilt, you know that I’ll try anything once. In the case of the t-shirt quilt, I knew I would need to do this project twice. The first was for our son, the second would be for our daughter for her elementary school “graduation”. The first quilt was a challenge (to put it mildly) so I knew I would need to come up with a different method for the second. Voila! I was scrapbooking one weekend at one of my favorite places, The Scrapbook Manor, and Karen had a recently completed t-shirt quilt draped over a chair. I found my new method! Grab a cold lemonade and your stack of t-shirts and let’s get started!
I started by cutting all the t-shirts down to size. I cut both the front and the back of each t-shirt at the same time with my Olfa rotary cutter. Once again, I used a 12″x12″ cardboard template from my scrapbook supply stash.
Next, I sandwiched a piece of 11″x11″ batting in between each pair of t-shirt layers.
I stitched both diagonals to hold the batting in place. If I had to stitch over a large area of screenprinting, I stitched on top of a piece of paper so the presser foot wouldn’t get stuck on the ink.
Next, I laid all the squares out on the floor to determine their placement so no two similar colors would be touching, if possible. Starting with the top row of squares, I seemed the squares together with wrong sides facing so that the seem would be on the front of the quilt. I used a 1″ seam allowance. When I finished all the rows, I seamed each row to the next using the same procedure again with a 1″ seam allowance.
With the t-shirts all connected into one blanket, I stitched 1″ from the edge all the way around the outside of the blanket. That was the easy part! Little did I know the next step would take 5 times longer to complete!
Next, I used my favorite Fiskars scissors to cut a fringe in each seam taking care to stop short of cutting through the stitching.
Once that process was complete, my T-shirt Quilt #2 was finished! Much easier than the first! Give it a try – you know you have the t-shirts!
Enjoy the Little Things 