Do you want to see how the T-shirt quilt is going? It’s spray basted and ready to quilt. Here’s how I made the top.

***I will write a father’s day post, just not today. Growing up, my Dad had a yearly meeting on father’s day weekend. So we never actually celebrated with him on that day. I’ll be celebrating my Dad (and the fathers I got when I married my husband) in a post later this week.

Okay, back to the quilt. I’m making a queen sized t-shirt quilt, so I was sent enough shirts to get thirty six 14″ blocks out of them. (Some used just the front of the shirt, others were double-sided.) After cutting the shirts apart and into big square-ish shapes, I ironed fusible interfacing on the back of each one. Why interfacing? T-shirts are stretchy and these ones had different thicknesses too. The interfacing stabilizes the fabric so blocks stay the size I cut them to, leading to a nice quilt instead of a puckery wonky mess.

I chose lightweight Pellon fusible interfacing. It happens to be the cheapest one available, which is nice, but it also has this cool feature. Can you see it? I ironed the interfacing to the back of the shirt AND the ironing board cover. You’re not supposed to do this. Also, don’t mess up and try to press it sticky-side-up. Your iron won’t recover nicely.

This lightweight fusible, however, peels right off the cover and leaves no residue. This meant that I could get nice firmly fused edges on all the shirts. Yes!

Alright, so here you have your stack of shirt squares with the fusible on them. Once I’ve got the layout just right, I put sticky notes on each to know where they belong in the grid. So the one on top of this one goes in the fourth row (D) and the fifth column.

Then I trimmed the shirts to 14.5″. The extra half an inch goes into the seams, 1/4 inch on each side. I didn’t have a large enough ruler to measure out this size, so I combined two of them. To make it more likely I wouldn’t have mess-ups I marked the 14.5″ line with tiny sticky notes with arrows. When I could, I centered the motifs.
 
Here’s the top! It’s not a super-glamour shot but you can see the whole thing. Now it’s time to quilt it!