tee-shirt monster revisited

Mostly because I had the fusible interfacing coming out my ears, wanted to know if I could throw one together, and because they [the tee shirts] were taking over my life, for these three reasons, I had to do something. So I made a quilt.

Okay, it's still in pieces. Semantics.


It wasn't until after most of them were cut that I said to self, "genius, try cutting a common size" - I went for "get as many in here as possible" rather than have a perfect grid with several squares of mostly 10" of color with a tiny logo in the corner, or an oddly balanced square because of where the design fell in relationship to the neck and arm of the shirt. I've seen the adds for this type of quit, and most of them just look really strange to me [see the neck/arm reference], which is why I have a sort of pinwheel in the middle. I could have planned it better with the other small bits, but admittedly,  they showed up after the fact, having been cut out a very long time ago and gotten lost. All this is just great experience for  that great day when someone utters the inevitable, "Hey, can you make a tee-shirt quilt?" I did finally wise up and start trimming things to a uniform size, at least a length, so clearly there is some continuity among the pieces. A few I had to make up the difference with sashing.

This will end up being a nice throw size, and it will have no more than a 2 1/2" border around the outside in the same sea-foam-y green, and will, at some point, be machine quilted.

Some things I learned from this:

• evaluate the design on the shirt first, and assign it to a "small, medium, large" et cetera system. Tipping the "Del-a-Where?'  and company on it's side works with the strip placement along the bottom only because the others are tall and skinny. 
• have a pre-determined cut-to size, and base it on the largest design [hence the small, medium  large, et cetera] It will make the piecing go that much smoother.  
• be careful about the heat setting on the iron and the silk screen design. Some of the designs smudged under the heat of the iron, so I had started to press the interfacing with the silk screen against the fabric of the ironing board, and the iron against the interfacing. 
• Whenever possible, keep things going the same direction.