Hi, and thanks for stopping by. I recently finished and delivered this quilt and wanted to share/document the process.
Last year my friend asked me to make a t-shirt quilt (between other projects) for her son-in-law. He worked for the baseball team during his time in college at University of Miami. The Hurricanes team provided him with tons of shirts, and something needed to be done with them. Most of these were very stretchy nylon or polyester type fabrics that work better for sports players. I also couldn't come up with a layout for a bit, until I looked again at the logo for U Miami, which is a 2 color U shape. I realized I could use the U shape in the layout, which would use the 4 orange shirts, and 4 of the green. One of the white ones had a front and back design, and a few had designs on the sleeves.
The cutting and prep work began. I saved any sleeves that had a logo, and prepped all the shirts with fusible featherweight Pellon interfacing. But the interfacing didn't stick to most of the shirts, so I had to keep trying, with progressivly hotter temperatures with my Oliso iron, until the interfacing was really sticking to the very stretchy shirts, to stabilize them enough to make the quilt. I ended up using a pressing cloth, as well as the woolen mat, and was finally satisfied.
The next step was figuring out how to create the curves. I had taken a class with Mario using the Classic Curves ruler by Color Girl Quilts. I couldn't find mine, so I borrowed Maureen's, a wonderful friend I've made in the Evening Star guild (Mineola, NY). But the ruler makes squares with curves, so what if I want to only curve one corner, and how much of a curve should I do? I played with the ruler on the shirt corner for a bit, and decided to use the 7" line on the 2 outer blocks, and the 4" line on the 2 white blocks. I cut the squares that would be the new corners with White solid from Island Batik, and the Pineneedle basic and then used an orange cotton printed fat quarter for the orange part.
The layout was still not pleasing to me, because there were more green shirts and placement to make the U stand out would not work. So I opted to make the 2 lower corner blocks using the sleeve designs. I pieced them together, then added more of the Pineneedle and orange fq to make them equal the size of the blocks which was based on one shirt that had a larger design. They all were trimmed to 14 1/2" and a walking foot was used to enable smoother sewing with the still a little stretchy shirts. I added s small border with more White to help stabilize it.
Margaret had asked for orange Shannon Cuddle wide back for the backing and I searched for a baseball theme quilting pantograph that would work, without being too dense or juvenile. Flying Baseballs from Urban Elementz was the best choice, and I layered the quilt with Warm & White batting. Aurifil thread 40-three was used for quilting, in Chalk, a soft white. I used 50wt for piecing.
Binding was more Pineneedles from Island Batik, and one more sleeve design was added to the label on the back, which I embroidered.
I know he's thrilled with it, because Margaret sent me a video. She's sure they'll be using it for many years to come. The quilt measures about 60 by 74, and I've heard they are using it on their bed.
I had fun, and was grateful to Margaret for giving me time to design this, figure out the curve and get it done! I'm also grateful to have the Handi-Quilter Amara with Pro-Stitcher to enable me to quilt great designs.
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