This week's blog is a happy progress report on the status of my t-shirt quilt that I'm working on with my mom.
T-shirts picked - Check! That's right, all thirty shirts were painstakingly prioritized among a seemingly endless collection from my grade school, high school and college years. To satisfy the engineer in me, they've also been arranged in chronological order with the top two rows for grade school and junior high, the middle two rows for high school, and the last two rows for college.
Cut t-shirt squares - Check! Cutting thirty squares of old t-shirts precisely into 16" x 16" squares lends itself to reminiscing of the memories I'm choosing to remind myself of more often by making this quilt. When I did this back in March, that's exactly what I did. Good stuff.
Iron backing onto t-shirts - Check! Mom took care of this in March to make sure the t-shirts don't stretch once they're sewn together. Glad she knows what she's doing!
Choose border fabric - Check! This was a culmination of
three trips to the fabric store: one by my mom, one by me, and one yesterday by the two of us together. Luckily, although neither of us found a winner on our own, jointly we were able to find a color combo that worked. Since there was no chance of a color theme with various color t-shirts on the quilt (reds, blues, blacks, maroons, yellow, navy, green, etc), we decided to go for a neutral white with black and black with white. Which I promptly took to my parents' house and...
Cut border fabric - Check! The picture doesn't seem to do it justice, but I measured and cut 72 strips of 17" x 3" border pieces and 42 border squares of 3" x 3" to go in between the t-shirt squares. Needless to say, the scissors (and my fingers) got a work-out! There are still some details to be determined regarding the potential for an overall border and the material on the back, but this was a huge step in making progress along with...
Sew it all together - Major progress! That's Mother Dearest working diligently sewing together all of the pieces on the sewing machine as we watched the Cardinals game and then Lions/Patriots pre-season game yesterday. Naturally, it's part of the overall strategy here to have me do the parts that are not seen (i.e. cut edges) and have my mom do the visible sewing work. She has a much better knack for these types of crafty things, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm not even a novice seamstress. I'm lucky to have such a capable and willing mother. :-)
Next steps - finish sewing it all together, potentially add a border, decide on the fabric/color for the back, have it quilted and enjoy!
Timestamp:
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