The New Project

So here's a hint about the project I started:



A Star Wars quilt? No, a t-shirt quilt for little brother - God willing it will be his Christmas present. (Technically I should have plenty of time to finish it, but I think we all know how many other things could happen.) My little brother is actually a bit of a clothes horse and had piles and piles of clothes in my parents basement. I'm told he would come over from time to time and look for something - just saw it as extended storage I guess! Finally Mom put it all in trash bags for the Goodwill, and told him to take out anything he wanted to keep. After he'd had his go at it, I went down to see if there was anything I might want - little brother's old clothes are an especially rich source of really great PJs. When I started going through I saw all these t-shirts that represented a lot of things from his past - that have "sentimental value" as a sister would put it. So I asked him if he would like to have them made into a quilt and he said yes.

That's right I volunteered!!

I have made one t-shirt quilt in the past. Actually, not surprisingly, it's still a not quilted top. But basically I knew when I volunteered that it's a tedious process - ironing interfacing onto the back of all those logos and cutting them to a usable size - bleh. It's slow going.

But I actually jumped at the chance to do it because I had an ulterior motive:



Yes that's right, I wanted to play with the scraps! I am making a "parallel" t-shirt quilt out of the non-logo parts of the t-shirts. I'm not using interfacing for this, so I've been experimenting with levels of starch. Heavily starched the jersey actually behaves quite well - although now I have to do some restarching of the bits I went too easy on. I mean you kind of have to be gentle with the jersey, but I'm not having much trouble sewing those nine patch blocks. (Oh yeah, I have no design plan for this. Basically I am cutting plain squares and sewing some nine patches and some sixteen patches. So far everything is 12" but I plan to through in some 16" bits. Then I will find some way to put it all together.)

Anyway, I've been thinking about doing a quilt like this for awhile, I think because I've been thinking a lot about "recycled" quilts and wanting to try to make some. Do not get me wrong, I love my stash, but I also love any opportunity to get back to my quilt making "roots". If you have ever made a t-shirt quilt you know that there is a LOT of waste. Last time I used those extra bits as rags in my old apartment, but it was still way more rags than I even needed. It seems like the quilty thing to do is stitch 'em together....

*Sigh* however I do not know how far I will get on this project. I really need to focus on getting my two big quilting projects quilted. Because if I move - well there is nothing worse than moving two big quilts in the process of being quilted, because WHO KNOWS how long it will be before they actually get finished then!!