I meant to get a lot more done with my quilt projects this week, but having been laid low by some adorable little germ vectors (ie, children) graciously sharing their colds with me this week, I spent most of my weekend getting caught up on all the stuff I missed and didn’t get done during the week. Still…I promised myself that I’d set aside time to quilt each and every week, so I headed up to the loft tonight to make the backing for my t-shirt quilt.

Every quilt that I’ve done so far has had a back of what is called batik fabrics. There really wasn’t a conscious choice behind it the first time, I was in a hurry to make that first quilt and the fabric just “looked” right when I laid it out as the backing in my head, so I went with it. When I made my second, I went back to the batik section and picked out a great blue pattern that worked beautifully on my mom’s christmas present quilt. From there, I just kind of stayed with it. I guess I’ve decided that “batik” backs will be my “thing” for now. The style of quilts I’ve done have varied wildly from project to project, so I like the idea of a unifying theme in at least one regard.

I pulled out the purple batik I had originally picked out for this t-shirt quilt and then did some quick measurements. I’m not the greatest at math, but I smelled something fishy pretty early on in the process. It just didn’t feel like enough fabric to cover the whole back and to have my extra inches on each side that the longarmer had asked for. Turns out, I was right. A quick trip to the store and a desperate hunt for that purple fabric was in vain… no extra fabric to be found, so I mentally relegated my purple batik to the “future project” drawers in my loft and began hunting for a new back for the current quilt.

This is what I went with:

I absolutely love it. I like the deep blue (almost a purple) and the mix of other colors in the leaves.

After ironing out my two 44 inch wide x 92 inch strips, I then put them front to front and sewed them together right down the middle, giving me the 82 x 92 backing fabric that I required. It was when I was doing all the math on the size of this quilt and actually laid it out on my living room floor that I decided it would not have any external border. It is already huge. I’ll just quilt it, as is, and then put a nice strong binding on it.

This one is ready to go to the longarmer! I’m very excited.

Quilt 5 came about because of two details in my life:

1. I’ve been with my company for almost 11 years now. In 10 years, you tend to collect a lot of t-shirts. From events, special gigs, etc. They just kind of accumulate. When I moved to the UK to work for a year from our office there, they dubbed me the most branded man in the office because I had an endless supply of work related t-shirts.
2. My mom was having hip replacement surgery and I knew I’d be there for 6 weeks taking care of her post-surgery. She lives in a small Iowa town that doesn’t really have a lot going on, despite being a college town. I knew I’d need something to entertain myself.

Enter the idea to free up some space in my closet by doing….a t-shirt quilt! I’d heard of them before and figured the pile of shirts was there , why not give it a go? It’d make a great thing to hang on the wall behind me at my desk.

Unfortunately, much like with quilt #4, I wasn’t really planning to be doing a blog about this, so all I really have of the process is my instagram photos from my cell phone as I lived, worked and played out of my mom’s basement for 6 weeks. So forgive, the less than desirable process photos.

Now that I am on the other side of having down this quilt? I should have done this one before the “one block wonder” that was quilt #4. T-shirt quilts are surprisingly easy and fun to do. The hardest part was figuring out if I was going to keep a uniform size and shape to my blocks (and sacrifice parts of some of the shirts) or if I was going to try to piece together non-standard shapes.

In the end, I went with 12.5 x 12.5 blocks, centering them on the imagery of the shirt as best I could.

I had gotten through a good chunk of my stack, when my friend, Cristal, texted me: “You know you are supposed to back the t-shirts with a strengthening material, don’t you?” She had seen me mention that I was starting a t-shirt quilt on facebook and wanted to offer advice. Glad she did, because I texted back: “I do now!” A short conversation later, I had a much better idea of what kind of iron on interfacing I was going to be looking for and went to buy it at the store.

Step two was to iron all my squares with the backing that was meant to strengthen them and keep them from stretching. Knowing what I know now? I’d have done this BEFORE cutting the final squares, because I ended up with some squares with a bit of a sway from stretch as I cut. Fortunately, none of the sway was so big that I couldn’t hide it in the 1/4 inch seams on all sides.

Here’s my stack of squares, all ready to go:

With them cut out and fused with the interfacing, I laid them out on my mom’s kitchen floor and juggled squares around a bit until I had a layout I liked:

(note the denim shirt in the middle there…my very first Rackspace shirt!)

When I picked them up, I was very careful to make sure that I had picked them up in a specific order that I could repeat in reverse. That way I ensured I kept them in the order I had laid them out in. Even with as careful as I was being, I still managed to swap two squares at one spot on the lower half, putting like colors side by side. I didn’t realize it until the entire thing had been sewn together, so I just left it. It irritates me, but everyone else that has looked at the quilt has failed to notice it until I point it out, so… I’ll live with it.

I spent a number of days trying to decide if I was going to border the blocks and then sew them together. The longer I stared at the image above, the more I realized it was going to be next to impossible to find a border color that looked good and didn’t match one of the squares in the quilt. In the end, I elected to just sew them together as shown above and they look great!

I’ll be doing the border and sending this one off to the long arm along with #4 soon. Can’t wait to see it finished. Since I work at a technology company, I am hoping the long arm service I go with can do a quilt line pattern that evokes circuit boards. I think that would be highly fitting! We’ll have to wait and see.