T-Shirt Quilt

When I went to visit my family in Oklahoma I mentioned I made a t-shirt quilt.  I don't have many before pictures but I will show what I can.  First, I took a t-shirt and laid the entire thing on a cutting mat.  *Check to make sure you don't want to use the back image.  If you do, cut slits along the sides to cut them into two pieces.*  If you only need one side, it's super easy.  Take your ruler (I used a 12"x12" square-makes it way easier) and use a rotary cutter to cut the shirt into a square size of your liking. 

Some quilts use a 10"x10" and cut into the design a bit, some even bigger than mine.  Cut all your blocks out this way.  I had 30 blocks.  When your blocks are all cut, lay them out to decide where you want each block to be.

Then you can begin sewing.  I sewed each row together by sewing the first three together for each row first.  Then I sewed the remained two blocks for each row, without cutting any connecting threads.  This made it easier to pin together to sew each row to the next one. 

Finally, I had my quilt top assembled.  This is the part where Mom and I made a crazy trip to the fabric store.  At 4:30pm on Sunday, I was sewing my rows together when I realized the shop might close early.  Mom looked it up, saw they closed at 5, and yelled, "Get your shoes!"  We looked like crazy quilters sprinting to the car, but we made it to the store by 4:55.  The lady at the store laughed when we told her I almost wore my pincushion that had been on my wrist because we were in such a hurry.  We were rushed because we needed the backing for the quilt.  My quilt was just at 60 inches wide, which is what width t-shirt knit usually runs.  So I got 2 1/2 yards of black knit.

Then came the more time-consuming part.  I cut out batting my Mom already had to fit the size of the quilt, along with my black backing.  Then I laid the top down first, then the backing, then the batting.  Next, I pinned together all three layers.  It's similar to making a pillow in that you put right sides together and sew around all four sides, leaving a little space open.  Then you can flip it right side out and hand-sew the opening closed.  Woohoo!

The only things left to do were to tie the quilt and sew the patch I had created for the center.  To tie the quilt instead of hand-sew, I bought some black yarn and a fairly thick needle.  At the corners of the blocks I went down from the front to the back and back up, tying a square knot to finish off.

And last but not least, I hand sewed a patch I created on my Granny's fancy embroidery machine onto a black block in the center of the quilt.

And...finished!!