Sew Along T Shirt Quilt Part 2: Cut and Prep Shirts
Got everything ready?
Great! I am certain I forgot something…but we will find out soon enough, I suppose. This is one of those steps you can do quickly – so you won’t need to much time – HOWEVER – read on before you jump in – you might want to do things differently than I did…
Now, the fun part…cutting out those shirts and pressing. I made quick work of cutting out my shirts… – laid them out, cut them in a quick pass with the rotary cutter.
Keep as much of the front as you can…
Lay it out, cut it out. That simple. All you want to deal with right now is the front block. unless there is something on the back that you want to use in your quilt – if that’s the case, then you will want to cut down the side with scissors and cut them separately so you don’t lose something. Save the backs and, if you are anything like me, any potentially usable scraps (sleeves, strips, hems)…for your quilt or other projects. I have some collared shirts in my pile and I love reusing the collars for waistbands. And the buttons…who doesn’t love free buttons?
Now is time to starch your shirts or add interfacing/stabilizer if you chose to go that route. I just sprayed way too much starch on mine and ironed them so they would be nice and stiff.
This a good time to measure your designs. I didn’t do this…kinda wishing I had…but I didn’t…I just laid out each shirt front and cut as big a piece as I could with measurements divisible by 2. Wish I had stayed with 4s…but I had several that just worked better with 6″ and some 2″ cuts. In hindsight, I wish I had left some extra width as well and just traced around what I thought I would use…you’ll see why later. But I’m a jump in and get it done kinda person…sometimes that’s good, sometimes I make more work for myself. So, once you are finished measuring, you can plan out your finished quilt. I cut them out already…so I’m stuck with what I got…
That’s it for this post!
A little preview of Part 3 – which I am already in the middle of – I’ll add some things I learned to this and show you some more of the process I went through, maybe save you a little work:
Quick little snapshot of my sort of planning it out – graph paper worked great, so did a spreadsheet and scaled pictures – we’ll get into that more later – just wanted to mention it in case you want to plan before cutting…in which case, you’ll want to look at Part 3 before jumping to part 2. One of those do as I say, not as I do moments….
Here’s a snapshot of some of my planning scribble…
Now, once I was happy with that…sigh. The fun part… I had flipped some measurements and left a couple of things out…so begin again. Did a little research to see if I could find some kind of online quilt planner…because as much as I like how easy the graph paper is, I am pretty sure I would end up changing it along he way…no luck. Nothing that looked free simple enough…so I got to work on a spreadsheet app – that worked well – The pics are pretty easy to resize along the way and the table in the document easy to adjust to square sizing – but of course when I actually started laying it out, I changed the whole thing – so maybe just skip the whole planning process and spread everything out and make it up as you go? Here’s what I have so far…
