The T-Shirt Quilt Journey: Prologue

I like tshirts and buy a bunch of them. I also like food and stress so they never fit for long. But what does one do with an old tshirt? It’s wasteful to toss them, no one wants them donated and I’m never going to be my 20-year-old size again. So t-shirt quilt it is then.

About 10-ish years ago a cut a bunch of shirts up, stitched them together and tried to back the resulting mess with fleece. This was a terrible idea for several reasons. Women’s shirts are stretchy and thin, and ended up getting joined by a tangled snarling mess of thread. Fleece was heavy and awful and impossible to sew on nicely, and the end result was a limp and heavy and useless pile of fabric. I removed the fleece , folded up the shirt king, and put it in storage and moved to Japan. I didn’t move across the Pacific just because of the shirt blanket but it didn’t help.

Recently I pulled the whole mess out of storage and started anew, older and wiser and with a much better internet to get advice from. I pulled all the threads from the old version, added interfacing and just generally upped my game. Now I’ve got eleven 2×2′ panels, almost enough for a slightly excessively sized quilt.

So first off, real quilters iron like crazy. Younger me was just not ready for that, I’m in a more mature place now.

Secondly, so much interfacing. While I collected the tshirts organically over time, I’m at the fabric counter on the regular now for interfacing. The lady who mans the scissors knows me, and I don’t think she has faith in my progress. “A lot of people are doing tshirt quilts now,” she said, guardedly. There was no followup statement.

So the bitch about womens shirts is that they are thin and stretchy, but also that the graphics tend to be placed a bit high so they hit the right part of the chest. If you want a 12″ square out of them with the complete graphics, you will often find yourself running into the armpits and even some seams. And my shirts mostly have at least one X in the size, I don’t know how smalls would work. However, I am learning that a 12″ square is maybe a bit much and I could settle for less. A few borders will make up the difference if you need it.

Some lightweight or even featherweight interfacing was all I needed to turn women’s stretch shirts into well-behaved panels. Iron it on and suddenly your standard needles and thread will plow neatly through the material and your seams will be perfectly acceptable.

I’ve rested here for a few weeks because I’ve run out of shirt panels and to psych myself up for the next step: adding batting and backing is going to be new territory for me and this blanket is inconveniently large. I’ve been practicing by making pot holders and placemats at a rate not seen since I had one of these:

…and it could be going better. And that begins the story of a woman who can’t really sew trying to make an entire king-size+ t-shirt quilt.