DIY Friday: T-Shirt Quilt
While we are getting ready to move later this summer, I am working on hunting down furniture and home decor for our new place. In order to share with you what I am up to, I am introducing DIY Friday once a month. To start off, I want to share with you is the T-Shirt Quilt I made!In the last three years, we have moved 6 times (yes you read that right, SIX). In those six moves, I have gotten ride of clothes, furniture, and just stuff. In going through our clothes, I came across a bunch of t-shirts that neither The Husband or I did or could wear anymore. A lot of these shirts we didn't care about anymore so I donated them. But there were about 30 that one of us had some kind of attachment to. So I took to Pinterest to figure out a way to keep these shirts. There are 100 ways to keep t-shirts but I decided on a T-Shirt Quilt. There a lots of companies you can send your t-shirts to who will make the quilt for you. But these cost on average about $150 for a full size blanket. I did a bit of research and found a couple of tutorials and decided I was going to make my own!I learned a lot making this quilt and I wanted to share my tutorial with you:Supplies
- 25 t-shirts for a Queen size quilt
- 7 yards of Fusible Featherweight Interfacing for backs of t-shirts ($3.49 per yard)
- 3 yards of Soft N Crafty Polyester Batting 48" ($5.99 per yard)
- White thread (already had it)
- Thread the same color as the fabric for the back of your quilt (already had it)
- Square of plexi-glass to cut t-shirts ($10.89)
- 4 yards of Diamond Double Face Quilted Material for the back ($4.99 per yard)
- Yarn to tie quilt ($3)
Total Cost: $76.25Steps
- Gather all of your t-shirts and figure out which ones you are going to use. Figure out how large you need your square of glass to be. This is critical when ordering your square of glass.
- Cut the backs off of all of your shirts so all you have left are the fronts, but leave the sleeves on.
- Order your square of plexi-glass. Mine came in less than a week so I had plenty of time to cut the backs off the shirts
- Using an iron, attach the interfacing to the backs of each shirt. You want to use enough interfacing to cover the back of the shirt. Doing this before you cut the square will keep your fabric from stretching.
- Once ALL of your shirts have interfacing, cut the square out of each shirt.
- Now comes the fun part, figure out how you want your quilt to look! I spent a lot of time laying out the squares and deciding where each one would go.
- Take each row and sew the squares together in that row
- Once you have the rows done, sew the rows together. This was the most time consuming part for me. This was my biggest sewing project yet so I was not sewing in straight lines at first...
- In my case, I bought pre quilted fabric for the back of my quilt. This fabric was not wide enough for my quilt so I bought enough fabric that I could cut it in half, sew it together and it would be wide enough and long enough for the back of the quilt.
- Place the batting on top of your sewn together t-shirts. Cut the batting to be the same size as your quilt top.
- Top this off with the fabric for the back of your quilt
- I folded the front of the quilt in about 1/8 of an inch and the back in about 1/8 of an inch so I would not have to do any pipping around my quilt.
- Sew the three pieces of fabric together.
- To tie the quilt, put a tie in each corner of the squares that touch the inside of the quilt. This was very simple and I finished it in about 10 minutes tops.
I have to say that while the quilt is not perfect or in any way straight, I am so proud of it! I hope you enjoyed this DIY and it is helpful! Let me know if you find different ways to do this!