The Quilt, Part 3

I hit a bit of a slump this week in quilt-making, mainly because I hit a slump in life. Megan and I like to call it "I don't feel like being an adult today" kind of thing. Which generally results in us watching entire seasons of "Scrubs" in short sittings. But it's time to get back on the ball!

So I'm in the process of cutting all the extra junk off the t-shirts (like the sleeves, collar and bottom seam) and ironing backing onto it. Check out this Andrew Bird shirt getting sliced, diced and heated to its quilty DOOM!

Here we have the t-shirt, unharmed and unaware of its future demise. But fret not gentle reader. This fabric may die as a t-shirt, but it will be reborn as a BADASS quilt. (I like to try to make the whole quilting process sound sexy and dangerous as much as possible. Helps preserve my frail manhood.)
I'm looking to take this badboy and have nothing but two pieces of fabric, with no seams, tags, collars or anything. Bye bye birdie!


Because I'm a sadist, here's a glimpse of the shirt midway through the hacking. I took off the sleeves and back. I took a bit of the backing fabric, and cut it at the same time to get the same shape.
The quilting ruler (is that what it's called) is really necessary, because t-shirt fabric is pretty soft and moved around a lot. I also had to watch the collar, so I didn't cut too close to the image.
Next its off to the ironing board. The backing fabric looks like a regular woven fabric, but has little gluey dots all over it. I bonded them together at medium heat, and put another layer of fabric over the top so it didn't get too hot.

And behold! The final results. I worried that with the glue it would be stiff, but it's actually very soft. The outer side feels like the comfy shirt it used to be, and the backing gives it a support making the whole thing feel more like a nice flannel. Only downside so far: if I iron for too long, it leaves a grid impression from the ironing board on it. But in the days following that's worn down quite a bit.

One other tip. The backing can get expensive for an otherwise dirt-cheap project. We get a Jo-Ann's Fabric coupon flier in the mail each week, and there's almost always one for 50 percent off a single item. I recommend going that route, because the backing is needed for any piece of fabric on the quilt.

Also, I'm taking Jon's advice on using as little backing as possible. I'm starting off by putting backing on the front halves of all the t-shirts (the sides with the images) and if I end up needing more material for the blank squares, I'll back the backends of the shirts.

Iron on!