Me & Mimi's Crafting Nook

We received a request to make a young man a t-shirt quilt.  This young man played baseball throughout his school years and had started college where he is continuing to play ball.

We had a blast doing this quilt for this wonderful family.

1st step is to find out exactly how big your wanting your quilt.  This will determine how many t-shirts you will need for this project.  Below you will find an excellent chart that will assist you in this.  Chart  We used this to determine the size of the quilt and the number of shirts to use for each size.

Once you find this out you are ready to pick the shirts. Now starts the fun part, start arranging the shirts the way you want them on the quilt. (We made a list of how she wanted them placed.)  Also at this point, we measured the design or decals that your putting on the quilt.  After doing that step we start to cut the shirts.  We cut the shirts from the side seam to the collar.  This allows you enough space to  trim to the correct size.

Once you have finished cutting the designs and decals out of the shirts, it is time to take the stabilizer and cut to desired size.  The stabilizer we used came from Hobby Lobby.  The stabilizer will have a glue like substance on one side, this is the size that is placed toward the wrong side(or back side) of the fabric or t-shirt.  If glue like substance is turned the wrong way(toward the iron) the stabilizer will stick to the iron( very very messy, Mimi has done this).  Irons are ok if you don’t have a Singer Iron Press,( this is a larger form of a regular iron).  You do not have to have a iron press however it makes it a lot easier to do the larger pieces.

The next step is to lay out the designs like you did at the beginning.  If you have different sizes as we did you may have to take some of the t-shirt fabric and fill in to make the row the same size.  This will make the rows a lot easier to assemble.  Mimi sewed a complete row together then went to the next one and so on. Once all the rows were sewed she then sewed each row together making the top of the quilt. ( At this point I had a camera malfunction and took me some time to get a new one,  Sorry for not have pictures for this step 🙁 )

You will have three layers of this quilt:

1. quilt top ( which we just made)
2. batting (we used batting from hobby lobby )
3. backing ( we found our backing on e-bay)

**Note: The batting and backing of the quilt should be larger than the quilt top the average is 4″ to 8 ” larger.

Lay the backing out spray with Spray-n-Bond basting adhesive .  Lay the batting on next and spray that with the basting adhesive, now is the final layer the quilt top.  Make sure that you smooth out all the bubbles(making it flat as much as possible)  from each layer before adding the next layer.

Now we are getting close to finishing the quilt.

After all the layers are bonded together we take it to the sewing machine and start quilting it.  The following pictures are how we did ours.

When finished with all the quilting, you would trim that excess batting and backing to make it even with the quilt top.

The last step is to put on the binding.  For full instructions on this you can refer back to our post or click here.

And Finally the finished product.

I hope you enjoyed our lil tutorial making a t-shirt quilt.  Stay tuned to our next project and I hope your enjoying our site as much as we are making memories together.