Learn How To Make A T-Shirt Quilt

I have to tell you that my daughter made this incredible quilt.  She just graduated from High School and is getting ready to leave on a mission to Guatemala.  She got the idea to do this from a friend of hers.  We enlisted the help of our good friend Cindy

http://cindysinspioraid.blogspot.com/

who is an amazing quilter.  She showed us how to make it.  I have had so many people ask how to make it that I thought that I better share.

One of the first tricks is this amazing 15" x 15" cutting board.  I got mine on Amazon.  You can see exactly if your square is centered before you cut it out with a rotary cutter.  She cut out twelve T-shirt squares for her quilt.

 

The second trick is this amazing fusible knit interfacing.  It made the shirts stronger, and easier to sew.  We got ours at JoAnn's.

 

Then she cut out twelve interfacing squares

and ironed them onto the back of the T-shirt squares.  She covered the interfacing with a rag while ironing. 

She then trimmed them down to 14" squares

so that they had a cleaner edge.

Then she cut out the material to outline the t-shirt squares.  She cut the strips at 2 1/4".  (On our next quilt we did 2 1/2" strips.  We thought that this was easier to work with.)

  She picked out 3 different fabrics and made enough strips to go around 4 shirts for each fabric. 

She Then sewed each t-shirt square with the fabric strips, making a bigger square. 

This is simple. She sewed a fabric strip on both sides of the t-shirt square.  Then she iron the seam and trimmed it.

Then she sewed the fabric strips to the top and the bottom of the square.  Then ironed and trimmed those. 

Once you have all your squares done, lay them out on the floor in the order that you would like them to go.

Then she sewed them row by row.  This is the time you can check to see if the two middle seams line up.  If they don't match, you can tweak it a little bit by re-sewing the seam that is too big and making it a little smaller so that the seams will match up. 

 

Then she sewed the 12 squares all together to make the quilt top.  

When sewing the rows together she started by matching the center seams,  pinning them first, then pinning the rest.  This will ensure that all your seams match neatly.

 She sewed it "stitch in a ditch" method, which means to sew on all seams when you are stitching the front and the back of the quilt together. 

 She also stitched an X through the center of the shirt square. 

She had a few problems with the needle sticking to rubber letters on the shirt's transfer.  She used painter's tape on the sewing machine foot to keep it from sticking.  Then she added the binding. 

 

She did an amazing job and I am so proud of her.  As you can see from all of the shirts, she is an amazing girl!

We took the leftover scraps from this project and made a skirt for my daughter.  See how we did it by clicking on the picture below: