T-Shirt Quilt Session 2: Cutting & Sorting Your Blocks

So, we've got all of our t-shirts now stabilized and we're gonna begin the cutting process. Now because we're using these smaller t-shirts to demonstrate, we do sometimes run into problems. For instance, if I wanna take my 12 1/2 inch ruler and make a nice square, you could see that there is no possibility of doing that with this quilt or with this t-shirt. And so I'm gonna go and I'm gonna take my 6 1/2 inch ruler and it's just not as big as I think I would want this. I wanna have a little bit of leeway to make some changes if I choose to, so I never cut them the size that I intend to have them. I always try to cut them just a little bit bigger. So I'm gonna take this 12 1/2 inch ruler back and I'm going to make sure that the ones are up in the right-hand corner and I'm going to try and as best as I can, and it's okay to cut into your sleeves, the sleeve area I'm going to try and make it so that way I have a larger square. And I think I'm going to cut this one 8 1/2 by 8 1/2, so you could see where that is going to be. I am going to try the best that I can, 8 1/2 and 8 1/2, so I'm going to want 4 1/4 to be the very center point. And I'm just gonna move it over the littlest bit. So now I'm gonna have the same amount on each of the sleeves, which is just my creative, artistic value, that's what I like to do. You can choose to have it off centered if you want. It's your t-shirt quilt, make it any way that you like, just make sure you've stabilized those t-shirts. I'm going to use my rotary cutter, but I did want to talk a little bit about this rotary cutter as we went. This is a rotary cutter that's ergonomically correct, and what that means is that it makes it easy for people who have arthritis or fibromyalgia, a lot of other disabilities, to be able to cut a little bit easier. This is a Martelli product and t-shirts are a little bit harder to cut through because you've got a lot more layers now. So I've got that cut. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm gonna make sure that I close my, I'm gonna rip that off and turn it around and now I'm going to match it up. I know that I want 8 1/2 and I want 8 1/2. So it's one of those instances where you never, ever, ever use your mat to measure. You're always gonna use your ruler, that's what they're for. So, we see the 8 1/2 line here and the 8 1/2 line across. And I'm gonna bring it down just a bit. And now I'm gonna use my regular cutter. Make sure you have extra rotary blades on hand because I will tell you that your rotary blades will dull very quickly. So there we go, we've cut our very first block. It's 8 1/2 by 8 1/2. Now, what do we do with this? Well, we take this block and we're gonna put it to the side, but if you can see, there's still plenty of fabric here to be able to utilize. So I'm just gonna put this to the side because I don't know that I'm not gonna use this to border something, have an extra piece inside. For instance, with this quilt over here, if something didn't quite match up I would just add a piece of fabric to it. So we need to keep it for those types of situations. So we've got all of our blocks cut. You may want to repress but you're going to want to now sort your blocks. You're gonna sort them by color, because you don't want the same color being in every situation. Now, if you could see, these blocks happen to be larger than this block, and that's because this was the largest that we could go with this one. It's not gonna be a problem because I can border it. Like I told you earlier, I'm not gonna worry about the size of the blocks. I just want them to be the biggest block that they can be when we cut them out initially. So we really do, we wanna sort them out so that way we can keep all light colors in an area and we don't want the light colors to be together, when we begin the arranging of them. We're gonna wanna separate them out. We're gonna want blues in different corners, so that way your eye will travel and they'll give depth to your quilt. If you have all the blues in one row and then all the greens, it would be interesting if you decided to do all of the the blues diagonally, and then all of your greens diagonally, because that would be a pattern. So I've separated them all out. And then we are going to go and start to design them. But first I'm going to show you. This is a situation where I had used the t-shirt that had a couple of snaps on them. It's sort of a fun idea. Don't let this bother you. What I did was I cut the bottom snaps off, and then I just took and sewed as close as I could to the edge here, so that way it would be connected. There's just a little area there, but right here, I've got it all sewn down. So I'm gonna be able to utilize this. The only time you're gonna be really worried about this is when you're doing your long arming or your quilting. If they're doing an all over design, you just wanna point that out so your long arm quilter is aware. And if a needle were to get stuck down there, it potentially could rip your quilt. So I wanted to use it because I just thought it was a nice little piece of artistic difference that the other quilts didn't have, the other t-shirts didn't have. So I'm gonna let you go and make sure you cut all of your squares out. And when we come back, I'm gonna show you what to do with some of the backs of your fabrics.