True to form, a few weeks before Christmas I decided to tackle an ambitious project with the aim to gift it. Armed with a bag of baseball jerseys/shirts, I set out to make a t-shirt quilt for my son, Kevin, an avid baseball player through his university years. I left myself only a couple of weeks, so I needed to be efficient and get going! I watched a few YouTube videos and this is what I found to work for me in a few simple steps!
Supplies Needed:
20-25 t-shirts
Light weight interfacing
Rotary cutter
Quilt board
Fabric backing
Planning the Quilt
As I was tight on time, had a limited number of t-shirts and armed with basic sewing skills, my approach was to keep the quilt design quite simple. These are things I considered:
- Size – As I wasn’t trying to size the quilt to fit a particular bed size, I determined the quilt size by the number of t-shirts available. (Initially, the quilt was 4 squares wide by 5 squares long.)
- Color – Fortunately, my son’s baseball shirts had complimentary colors and I was able to select a matching fabric for the back, sashing (pieces of fabric that “frame” each t-shirt block) and border.
- Fabric – For simplicity, I found 100 inch wide fabric to use as the quilt backing. This fabric size allowed for a single piece of fabric for the back and I avoided sewing together smaller pieces to reach the desired quilt width/length. (Good time saver.). I bought the complimentary fabric at Hobby Lobby, using the 40% coupon. Their fabric is always 30% off, but you can use the 40% coupon if they mark the fabric as “Not on sale”.
- Pattern – As I was not an experienced quilter, I decided to keep the pattern simple using uniform sized t-shirt blocks and used sashing and a border for a more “finished” look.
Cutting and Stabilizing the Pieces & Sashing
Keeping to an efficient approach, I was systematic in how I cut the t-shirt blocks. I followed these steps.
- Detach the t-shirt fronts from back by cutting the t-shirt at the side and shoulder seams.
- Remove the t-shirt sleeves by cutting along the sleeve seams.
- Stabilize the area of the t-shirt to be used for the quilt. Iron the area of the t-shirt to be used for the quilt. Iron a piece of light-weight interfacing on the back of the t-shirt piece to be used. I was not precise in cutting a piece of interfacing to fit the intended fabric block as I used a pattern in later steps for an exact fabric piece. This step is not difficult, just a bit time consuming.
- Create a pattern to use to create uniform fabric blocks. I had “pattern fabric” from another project. This fabric had a printed-grid and was super easy to make a square pattern. My pattern was 15 inches by 15 inches,
- Center the pattern on the area of the t-shirt you want to use. I used both the front and back of the t-shirts in many instances. My son’s “number” was 13, so most of his jerseys had a “13” on the back. Essentially, I found the center of the image on the t-shirt and centered the pattern from left to right. This was easy to do using the pattern grid. I placed the top of the pattern as near to the t-shirt collar as would fit. I used a rotary cutter and quilt board to do the cutting. (Rotary cutter was much faster than siscors.)
- Cut the size of sashing to be used. I used 2 inch wide sashing and cut pieces 2 inches wide by the length of each of the t-shirt pieces. These pieces are used in between each fabric piece in a row. (I cut the sashing to be used in between each row after I sewed each row together to be sure I had the correct length measurement.)
Placing the Fabric Pieces
I placed the cut fabric pieces on the floor to determine the best order and design of the cut fabric pieces. I tried to avoid having pieces of the same color or “13s” next to each other. I also realized I wanted an extra row to the quilt so cut a few more t-shirts and used a pair of baseball pants to fill in the missing spots.
Assembling the Quilt
- Assemble the rows first by sewing each fabric piece to a piece of cut sashing.
- Once, rows are assembled, cut the piece of sashing that goes between each row. I cut these pieces once I had the rows assembled for more accurate measurement. The sashing was 2 inches wide by the length of the row.
- Sew the sashing to the length of the row. Piece together the rows and sew together. I sewed a few rows together and then another few rows together and then sewed the two larger pieces together. (I was trying to avoid having too much fabric to work with at the sewing machine.
- Measure the outside length/width of the assembled quilt. Cut border pieces to go along the perimeter of the quilt. I cut 5 inch width pieces by the length of quilt. These border pieces need to allow for the border of the adjacent pieces, so the length needs to be 10 inches longer than the length of the quilt (if using a 5 inch border.).
- Sew the border to the outside of the quilt with mitered corners.
Quilt Back and Batting
I bought fabric that was 100 inches in width, so I could use a single piece of material for the quilt back. I had the blanket quilted by someone with a large quilting machine, so the quilt backing and batting needed to be 4 inches larger on all sides to work in the quilting machine.
Quilting and Binding
This step was really easy as I wanted the blanket quilted and a quilter did the quilting and binding. The quilter charged $.02/square inch to quilt. She also added the fabric binding to finish the quilt.
My son was very happy and nostolgic with the quilt. It was a great personal gift for him!
