T-Shirt Quilt Session 3: Utilizing Your T-shirt Fabric

Well, we should have all of our squares cut, ready, and sorted. And now I'm going to show you what we can do with some of the backs of those fabrics. Sometimes we just don't want to use a solid color. So I'm gonna show you a couple of different variations that we can do to just jazz up your quilt so it's not just all about the T-shirts, and yet it is all about T-shirts because it's the T-shirt that we're using. So I'm just gonna cut this edge off here. And the best thing to do, I find. So I usually have a trash bag really close by because the T-shirts tend to accumulate a lot of trash. And so I try to dispose of it right away so it doesn't get mixed up with the good fabrics that I still want to maintain. Now I'm probably going to, I want to cut these four inches. That's what size I want. You may choose to do something different, but I'm gonna do four inches for this particular project. And it's okay if there's a little variation. If you could see, I think that this T-shirt must've gotten caught in a little bit of bleach. I'm not gonna worry about that. To me, that gives a little creative, artistic flair. So I'm gonna cut another one at four. And I'm gonna do this for any colors that I want to use for the block that I'm going to be working on. I'm going to be doing a disappearing nine patch, but on my way to doing the disappearing nine patch, I'm also gonna show you how to do a checkerboard. So I have got my segments all sewn together. I've cut two whites and one orange. And then on another one, I've cut two oranges and a green. The green is gonna be actually be in the center. If I had wanted to do all white, of course, the green would be gone. I'm doing a disappearing nine patch, which is why I put the green in the center. I want to make sure that it has a little bit of a pop. If I had just wanted to do just the orange and the white, that would be perfectly fine. It's just that it's not gonna make a difference with a disappearing nine patch. I'm going to cut this as well four inches. And again, we see this is one, two, three, four. And I want you to be careful, because on these rulers, there are different markings. The top marking is for the left-handed. The bottom marking is for the right-handed quilter. That's because we cut in a different direction. Because they will cut with their left hand, and we cut with our right. So I'm going to just make that cut. And I'm going to do the same with this fabric. And I wouldn't get rid of this, because you don't know if there might be a section where you're going to need just a small little area, and I wouldn't cut it right now, because you never know either if you're gonna have to rip these off and use them for another portion of your quilt. So I just always keep these together, and I put them to the side. So I actually have two sets here. This is going to be more of the checkerboard. And it just kind of has a nice little variation to it. Enough that it will add just a little bit of pop of color. The way that I pressed mine is I always try to press it to the dark side. Because we all like going to the dark side sometimes. Now with green and orange, it's a little bit difficult. So because we used the orange with the white, we want to make sure that we go to the orange. And you'll understand why in just a second. So if you look, when we butt these up to each other, the seams are gonna lock in place. And the reason that they're going to lock in place is because there's a little bit of a ridge where we've just pressed. And I don't know if you can see, but see how they match up so nicely right here? I'm gonna take a little dab of glue. Elmers glue is my best friend. I use her for everything. And as well as putting that little bit of glue, because this is a T-shirt, there's always propensity that you're gonna want to try to stretch it. So I'm going to stick a pin in, and pins are sometimes hard to go into these because there's so many layers, but I'm also gonna stick a pin in at the edge here. And now I'm going to do this section as well. And it's just gonna hold it in spot, in place. And I'm just gonna make a real quick seam on that. And I'm gonna do the end as well on this one. I tend to use both glue and pins because I want to make sure that I don't have any distortion of the T-shirts at all. I'm using a 1/4 inch foot. You can also use, and I would recommend it highly, I do not have a walking foot for my little Singer Featherweight. If you don't have a Singer Featherweight, and you have a machine that you're using at home, I highly suggest you throw your walking foot on and learn how to use it. We have a segment on our National Quilters Circle that is just on walking feet. So if you don't know how to use it, I suggest you watch that video before you start making your T-shirt quilt. So I'm going to get it in place. I'm gonna drop the needle. Go back and forth a little bit because we want to make sure that we lock that seam. And I'm gonna lock the seam again, There we go. Take my pins off. And now I'm going to just press against those two seams. There's a lot of bulk when you make a T-shirt quilt. So what we want to do is we want to try and remove some of that bulk from our T-shirts. And this works perfectly, because if you open up the seam, it looks like a little checkerboard, and we'll press one seam going in one direction. This doesn't work on all blocks, but on the majority of blocks it does. So I highly suggest that this is a nice way to press your seams. And it looks so pretty too. Your quilt should look as pretty from the backside as it does from the front. And when you make any type of block, you're always gonna remember to square it up before you put it into your quilt, because you don't want to have a wonky quilt that makes it impossible for your longarm quilter to quilt. And it's gonna take away from the beauty of your quilt as well. So here we go. That is a checkerboard. Now we can keep it like that, or we're gonna add to this one, and you could see this is now gonna be a nine patch. So I'm just gonna add that one corner on. And it's already pressed the way it's supposed to be. Because if you press it when you're sewing the long strips together, you're not gonna have to worry about pressing each of these individuals, but you do want to make sure that you remember to put those pins in the right places, because you don't want it to distort at all. Nice thing about this Elmer glue as well is it washes out, so you don't have to worry about a residue. It will just wash out in the first washing if you happen to have a washing. And I guarantee these T-shirt quilts will be washed. Something to remember too when you're putting the batting into the T-shirt quilts, make sure you're using either a wool or a bamboo. These tend to go to children. And let's be honest, when we get to a dorm, there's a little bit of partying that might go on, and we want to make sure that our quilts are flame-retardant. We don't want one of their friends to come into their room and smoke and have the quilt go up really rapidly. The bamboo and the wool are both flame-retardant. And that's the best thing to put inside of these T-shirt quilts. The T-shirts generally are made up of cotton. So you're really staying away from any poly products, which is a petroleum product. There, go back and forth. So we've got this all set. And we're gonna press these seams the exact same way. We just push them open, and look at how nice they go. We don't want to, when we press, we don't want to be moving it back and forth, because it is a T-shirt. Even with the stabilizer, that's still a fabric on the back, and you can distort it. So that's the reason that we don't want to press with a movement of back and forth. We just want to press down. All right, so here we have a nine patch. Now, you can put a nine patch block in very lovely. It would go just about any place. You can see how it would change the look of a quilt and still add to the quilt, especially if pieces of the quilt were within that block. So now I'm going to go, and we are gonna make this into a disappearing nine patch. And you're just gonna be amazed at how fun this is and how fast it is. It just is gonna change up your quilt a little bit. It's gonna make you have that feeling where you're gonna let your friends think that you are so much more experienced than you may be. Because this is a block that makes it look like everything is so much more difficult. First thing we want to do is it's 3 1/2 inches. So that means it's gonna be 1 3/4. You always want to make sure that you cut it right down the center. And we're gonna cut it down the center in the opposite direction as well. Fun thing about this block is you just take it, and you just move a couple pieces. So now you've got this nice variation. If you put this into a whole quilt, it's a beautiful block because you see all of these diagonals of these beautiful squares. But we're just gonna have it just to show people how awesome we are at quilting. And you're gonna want to start with a pin at the top and a pin at the bottom.. And the reason for that being as well, we don't want the presser foot to move our fabric at all. We want to make sure that it stays where it needs to be. Because we want to have a square block. A square block without any edges. And we're gonna lock that. There we go. You're gonna want to put it out because you want to make sure that the next one you do, you do the exact same way. You don't want two blocks that are not going to butt up the way that they need to. Remember, you might want to use a thimble when you're putting these pins in, because it is really difficult. You gotta use a little bit more strength than normal. Doesn't Ruby just sew so quietly? She's such a good little machine for sewing projects like this. The stitches are always just perfect for her. All right. Now we're gonna want to press our blocks in the same direction. I tend to like to press it where the larger blocks are. So I'm gonna have my seams actually following that direction towards the white. And there's steam on this, I'm gonna try and turn it off because I don't want steam. And I'm also gonna press this one towards the white. And then as I turn it around, I'll butt those edges up. This is not an uncommon problem when you've got this much fabric. So just make sure that your seams are pressed. See, it's right where the, we would have had the same issue here. I am using just a little bit of steam now just to help hold that down, there. Steam can sometimes be our friend. All right, I'm going to just flip it. Seams are going in opposite directions. I'm gonna take a little glue. Going to take a pin or two, and we're gonna begin sewing. And this is the block. Always remember to lock it in place, lock that seam in place, going back and forth just a few times. And here we have our disappearing nine patch. You'd never know that that's what we started out with. We're gonna square up because we want to make sure that we have the same size blocks. Now, these blocks, let's look and see. These blocks are actually 9 1/4. So I'm gonna try and square this up to 9 1/4. Actually, I might keep this one at 10 and utilize in another quilt. It's so pretty. Definitely we can though square up 10 in a quarter. And I probably should for you, but I was being a little selfish here. And you know, you don't even have to make it. You don't have to even keep it being consistent. Let's do a little artistic creativity here, and let's just make it a little bit different. Because it's not gonna be matching other blocks. I'm just gonna throw those away. And one side's just gonna be a little longer. It's just a fun little block that we'll be able to utilize in this quilt. All right, now the next block that I want to show you is a pinwheel Pinwheels are really simple. People make them much more difficult than they need to be. All right, here I've got two strips. It doesn't really matter what size they are, whatever size you decide you want to make them. These are four inch strips. So I'm gonna make 4 inch by 4 inch squares. I'm actually gonna use this little ruler here. So if you can see, 4 by 4. I'm just going to cut it up like this, lay these aside. I'm actually gonna use, this is just a mechanical pencil. And what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna draw the line through it. I'm gonna pin it at the top and the bottom. I don't want to sew through the center line. What I want to do is I want to put the center line on the guide of my foot. And the reason that I want to do that is because I want to make sure that I have a 1/4 inch line on each side. Remember to lock that in place. And this is gonna be really cool the way that I do this. You can do this chain variation where you continue to do a whole bunch of them like this, or you just take and you turn it around. And then we'll go the other side. I've got a little bit of a. Just a little bit of a catch there And lock it in place. Now what we'll do is I will take this ruler. I'll lay it down here. I'll cut up that line that we just drew. I'm gonna take my cutting mat. And I'm going to press it to the dark side again. I always think of Star Wars whenever I talk about pressing it to the dark side. My kids make fun of me, Luke, I'm your mother. There we go. All right. And we're gonna square these up because we want to make sure that we cut off the edges. So these are gonna be 3 1/2 inch squares. And a good way to do this is I actually have a smaller ruler that has the angle on it. If you can see the angle. And so I'm gonna put that right on that angle there. So I put it on the angle that I've sewn. I'm just gonna go across. I'm gonna use every aspect of that ruler that I possibly can to help me. That's what it's for. And I'm gonna end up with this perfect 3 1/2 inch half-square, or triangle, half-square triangles. And so now I've got all these pinwheels. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna make a pinwheel block. Which will be kind of fun to have. See, isn't that pretty? So I'm just gonna fold it over like so. And again, because of the way that we have pressed our angles, they are gonna match up perfectly. We'll match them up. You can use your glue or you can just pin. It's totally up to you. And we're gonna sew those real quickly here. And this is where I'm talking about chain sewing. So you saw how I did that? That's what chain sewing is called, where you actually have a chain in between the two. The nice thing about this is even if you decide not to utilize this fabric from your T-shirts, you can make entirely another quilt with the back fabrics, using whatever quilt design that you've decided. I'm gonna press this to one side. Gonna press this to the opposite side. T-shirts are often hard to get them because they're so thick for the seams to press adequately. So you're gonna maybe have to do this more often than not as you put them together. So now we're looking at, we really want these triangles to match up. Now, there's a couple of tips to how to make that happen. First of all, the most important tip is accuracy in sewing. If you do your 1/4 inch seam and it's accurate, it will always match up. But if you tend not to be as accurate, you find the little crosshair in the back and you stick a pin through, and then you can stick a pin through the tip of the other. Now, I might have some difficulty with Ruby here going through all of these layers. Look at that. Some of the new machines don't go that well. And here we are. Perfect little pinwheel to put into your quilt. It'll just help give you a little bit of artistic difference that other quilts may not have. Most T-shirt quilts you see are just gonna be the T-shirts. We want you to have a little bit of specialty within yours. Something that says, "This is my pattern. This is something that I've done." Now, if you have some extras that are leftover, feel free to sew them together any way you want. They make wonderful borders. You can use them as a binding. You can use them as sashing in between your blocks. So next, I'm going to come back, and we're gonna talk about ways to change the T-shirt itself.