My Creative Space

I've managed to take over the dining table this week as I'm working on a custom t-shirt quilt for a customer.

Now comes the tricky part - as the t-shirts were all different sizes, I now have to make sense of the layout. I'm just waiting on some printed text blocks to arrive from Frankie and Swiss and I can get on with the job.

I had a couple of questions about this type of quilt when I posted a pic on Instagram so here's a step by step:

• Cut the t-shirt in half along the side seams to separate the back and front
• Block fuse a good quality woven interfacing onto the back of each printed side of the t-shirt (it's much easier if you have an ironing press rather than an iron)
• Cut your quilt square (make it large if you're unsure of your layout so you can trim it down later)
• Now that the t-shirt blocks are nice and stable and non-stretchy, you can just sew them in the same way as any normal quilt top.

There's also been a lot of this going on in the evenings. I'm working on something that's lots of fun and teaching myself new tricks as I go along.

The home of my creative space


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The Giant T-Shirt Quilt - The End

So here it is..... finally in all it's quilted glory!

Such a lovely backdrop (ahem) I realise, but this quilt is sooooo big that there's nowhere else to hang it for a photo.

Each piece was originally 15.5 inches square, which means that this quilt in now approximately 75 inches wide x 90 inches long or 190 cm wide x 228 cm long.

It's really difficult to see, but Bec straight line quilted in white thread either side of each seam line, and then quilted the diagonal lines in invisible thread (so that the stitching wouldn't interfere with the prints).

It's finally time to let go and send it off to live with its owner. It certainly was a learning journey!

The Giant T-Shirt Quilt

Brianna (or B-Fab as we like to call her) and Bec

Yesterday was deemed to be the day of quilting the giant t-shirt quilt (although I somehow managed to forget to actually tell Bec about this particular part of my plan before she arrived)....

The first step was the congregation of about a million safety pins.... the big wooden bench made this much easier (thank god).

Then the quilting began (notice how I'm not actually doing anything much other than snapping photos?)

Quilting is hungry work, so it was time for a homemade pita bread pizza break!

There was also cake.... there has to be cake (and the host always gets to keep the leftover cake - but that might just be a rule that is in place when I'm the host).

We decided to put the child to work....

....and reminisced about Bea from Prisoner (please note that it's not actually turned on).

There was a looooooot of quilting, before it was finally time to start on the binding.

Mmm lovely binding.

We finally finished the entire quilt just after dinner time thank goodness! I would never have been able to finish this without the wonderful help from Brianna and Bec. I'm indebted to you two ladies! I learned a lot about quilting today and had lots of fun too.

I don't have any photos of the finished quilt just yet, so I thought I'd share the out-takes instead - enjoy!

Stars and Stripes

In case you hadn't already noticed, the t-shirt quilt that I'm slowly working on, is made up of tees that were bought by the soon to be quilt owner on a trip to America last year.

She wanted an American themed backing fabric (which I couldn't find here in Australia), so I searched around online for some options for her to choose from. She's chosen this American Tribute Waving Flags fabric which I found at The Quilters Garden.

I ordered a little bit of extra fabric so that I could whip up another Kitchenaid Cover for her.... and I couldn't resist taking a photo of it on my beautiful Australia tablecloth!

Waste not, want not...

She's also ended up with a pot holder!

It's getting there.....slowly

The t-shirt quilt is finally on the home stretch.

I'd been waiting for these text panels to arrive for a few weeks now, but they finally turned up yesterday, so I sat down and finished the quilt top lastnight.

It's ended up being really quite large - about 2 metres wide x 2.4 metres long.

The backing fabric is also ready to go, so now I'm just waiting for the batting to arrive. I've booked in next Saturday with my helper and we're going to quilt up a storm!

My Creative Space

The floor was mopped just prior to this layout luckily

There's not much happening on the creative front this week.

My sister has to go into hospital for a little while, so I'm looking after my eldest nephew for the rest of the week (here's hoping that I don't forget to pack his lunch).

With the recent change in the weather, it's actually been cool enough to sit in front of the ironing press to interface all of these t-shirts.

It took a while to work on the layout as I've ended up with two different sized squares due to the fluctutation in sizes of the original tees.

I'm using the blank backs of the tees to fill up the empty spaces (they're the large unironed pieces that I've plonked on the floor just to work out the layout at this stage).  I'm going to have to add fabric around the sides of all of the smaller blocks to enlarge them and to keep everything even.

I'm feeling that there's a very good reason why I'm not a quilter!

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