Making a quilt starts with choosing the right tools

Part of spring cleaning is looking in our closets and dressers to see what we want to keep and what we want to let go of. Some clothes will be donated, but sometimes, some of my shirts find their way into a special pile I keep to make quilts. Used T-shirts work great too! T-shirts make great simple and quick quilts. With enough T-shirts, there’s no limit to the size of a quilt. This week I’ll be working on a lap size quilt that measures 48” x 48”.

T-shirt quilt 48” x 48”

For this week’s posts, I’m trying out a few new tools and notions along with some old favorites.

materials

fabric

• assortment of T-shirts
• Fairfield Quilter’s 80/20 Quilt Batting – 229 x 274cm (90″ x 108″)

thread

·         GÜTERMANN Cotton 50wt Thread 250m – Ivory

notions

·         Hemline Gold 45mm Rotary Cutter

·         Hemline Gold 45mm Rotary Cutter Replacement Blades

·         Hemline Gold Thread Snips

·         Hemline Gold Plastic Headed Pins (Black)

·         Hemline Gold Magnetic Pin Dish

·         Hemline Gold Quilters Clips (Pack of 30)

·         Hemline Gold Retractable Tape Measure

·         Hemline Gold Quilting Hand sewing Needles (Pack of 10)

·         SCHMETZ #4026 Chrome Jersey Ball Point Needles- 90/14 – 5 count

·         Sew Easy Square Ruler – 12½” x 12½” (31.75 x 31.75cm)

·         Sew Easy Square Ruler – 15½” x 15½” (39.3 x 39.3cm)

·         Sew Easy Quilting Ruler – 14″ x 4¼” (35.6 x 10.8cm)

·         Heirloom Double Sided Cutting Mat – 24″ x 36″ (61 x 91.4cm)

·         HeatnBond Woven Fusible Interfacing – Soft White – 55.8cm x 22.8m (22″ x 25yds)

equipment

·         Oliso PRO TG1600 Pro Plus Smart Iron – Turquoise

Quilting tools and notions used for this week’s quilt

The other important items we’ll need for this week’s project are T-shirts. How many? It all depends on how many T-shirts are ready to be put in a quilt, and to some extent, what the desired size of the quilt is. To make this quilt, I didn’t have enough T-shirts of my own to make my desired themed quilt. I put out a call for used travel or sewing-themed T-shirts. Thank you, Margo Clado, Charlene Jackson and Brandy Maslowski (aka Quilter on Fire), for their generous gifts.

For this quilt, we need 16 squares. However, as some of my T-shirts only have a little symbol or maybe just a word going across the T-shirt, I used a total of 18 T-shirts.

T-shirts for this week’s quilt

Today’s task is getting the T-shirts ready – it’s easy.

Use the Hemline Gold 45mm Rotary Cutter and the Heirloom Double Sided Cutting Mat – 24″ x 36″ to cut up the T-shirts. Start by cutting off the sleeves followed by the shoulder seams.

Step 1 in cutting the T-shirts

Cut out the seams on both sides of the body of the T-shirt.

Step 2 is cutting the T-shirt front from the back.

The last two steps for today are easy ones. Separate the front of the T-shirts from the back. Some T-shirts have designs on both the front and back, put those in one pile. T-shirts with no designs on the back, put in another pile.

Front and back of a T-shirt

Using the Oliso PRO TG1600 Pro Plus Smart Iron press the front of the T-shirts.

Pressing a T-shirt

Today’s prep work is done. It’s not complicated but may take a bit of time.

Tomorrow, I’ll continue to use the Hemline Gold 45mm Rotary Cutter and the Heirloom Double Sided Cutting Mat and we’ll also use HeatnBond Woven Fusible Interfacing – Soft White along with the Sew Easy Square Rulers. Join me!

Hemline Gold 45mm Rotary Cutter and HeatnBond Fusible Interfacing

This is part 1 of 5 in this series

Go to part 2: T-shirt quilts – Quilting rulers that make the cut!

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