Refashioning: T-Shirts into a Quilt

Making T-Shirts into a quilt was really popular a few years ago. Everyone was making them and it was revolutionary. Well. . .I may be a day late and a dollar short, but I still had a bunch of T-Shirts that I wasn't wearing, yet didn't want to get rid of, so. . .whether it's in vogue or not, I still did this project! I did do it a tad differently than the norm, so read on to find out how.

I work for my church in the office. Sometimes, I have to make these booklets with plastic binding. Well, I accidentally messed up two of the bindings, so instead of throwing them away, I took them home, taped them together to make a square, and used them as my quilt pattern.

This is how I cut my shirts out: I laid the pattern on top of the emblem of each T-Shirt, and just cut around it--all the way through each shirt--through the front and back at once. This made two pieces per shirt.

I kept cutting until I had cut thirty shirts. I had sixty squares when I was done.

Instead of throwing away the back pieces of the shirts, I actually kept them with their corresponding fronts as I sewed all the pieces together. Why did I do this? Two reasons: (1) Not all shirts were the same stretchy-ness. Some of the shirts stretched a lot more than others. Keeping an extra layer with every piece sewn added some body and heft which gave the whole project more uniformity. In fact, I actually traded around the backing squares on some of the stretchiest T-Shirts. (2) the extra layer added an extra level of warmness. (It also made the finished blanket 25-30% heavier, so if you want a lighter-weight blanket, don't do this. However, if you skip this step, make sure all your T-Shirts have the same stretchy-ness.) You can see my layers in the picture below. I used a simple zig-zag stitch with a wideness of 3 and a closeness of 1.5. The reason I waited so long to do this project was because I was hoping to have had a serger by now. Oh well, I don't. Anyways, the zig-zag stitch worked just fine!

I sewed them in five columns of six squares. Then I sewed the six squares together. I didn't use pins because they were all the same size squares. However, I only sewed a few inches at a time and made sure that all my seams matched up as I went along. Slow and steady wins the race!

I chose this baby blue/green jersey for the backing, simply because that was the only jersey I had that was wide enough. If you do this, make sure you use a jersey backing cloth as well. It will look and feel really weird if you use a woven cloth, that doesn't stretch, behind T-Shirts that do stretch. If all you have is woven, then you will need to iron on some non-stretch interfacing behind each of your T-Shirt pieces before you sew them all together, or at least before you sew all the layers together.

 Skipping ahead. I laid my backing cloth down first, then put my batting down, then laid the quilt top down over that. I trimmed the batting and then folded the backing cloth over the batting and connected it to the top layer with pins--pinning through all the layers at once. You can't really see it in this picture, but if you zoom in, you can see all the pins around the outside.

Once I sewed all around the quilt (and mitered the corners), I pinned through all the layers at the intersections of each T-Shirt piece. You can see what I'm talking about below. See how the pin goes through the corners of the white, yellow, green, and orange shirts? I then rolled it all up, and with the roll starting in my lap, I started feeding all these intersections through my machine, back tacking at just the intersections. This is a very necessary step because it keeps your batting (and everything really) in place. Little known fact: This is actually the act of quilting--when you sew through all the layers of a blanket to add warmth to a blanket, and to keep all the layers in place. (Some people think that quilting is when you sew a bunch of pieces together, but that is actually called "piecing" to make a quilt top.)

The finished quilt. Now I can keep all my sentimental T-Shirts that I never wear without them cluttering my drawers!

The finished quilt on my couch.

The End!

Simple Alterations for a Dress with a Gathered Skirt - Red Lace Dress

Remember when I made this Dolce and Gabbana inspired red lace dress? Well, ever since then, I try to be on the lookout for lace dresses. I got the one below from Goodwill for a dollar!! (Can you believe it???) It's obviously too big, so this blog is about how to do simple alterations to a dress with a gathered skirt.

First step is getting rid of those horrid armhole ruffles! They were actually sewn right in between the top layer and interfacing, so I simply cut them off, cutting really closely to the seam without snipping the important layers.

As you can tell from the picture above, the dress is just too wide for me, and the skirt is a tad long, making the dress look frumpy. 

There are several ways to go about altering a dress like this one. You could cut it apart and dart it and reattach the skirt. You could sew a seam from the arm hole to the bottom hem on both sides. I chose the method below because this dress has two layers to every part (lace over top a layer of white).

The first step in alteration was to sew a basting stitch about two fingers down from the waistband onto the skirt. This was primarily to keep the two layers together, but would also help me re-gather the skirt later when I reattached it.

A close-up.

In case it was too hard to tell from the pictures above, you can see the line I stitched onto the skirt here. (I'm pointing at it.)

The next thing I did was to cut right in between the waistband and the basting line I just stitched.

Here it is completely cut apart. See how important it was to baste the skirt before cutting? It stayed together in one piece this way.

Next, I sewed seams on either side of the bodice from the armpit to the waistband. I would have actually darted the bodice, except there is a little bit of elastic in the waistband and darting it would have made the waistband pucker weirdly.

Then, I trimmed the sides and overcasted the side seams.

Then, I grabbed the loose ends of the threads I used to sew the basting line and pulled at them and worked the fabric around until the skirt waist was the same size as the bodice waist.

Then, I pinned the bodice to the skirt, right sides together, and flattened the skirt back as much as possible to add a second row of pins. This second row was to help me as I sewed to keep the skirt gathers out of the way of the machine needle as skirt gathers like to pucker and jam in sewing machines.

This is after sewing and then overcasting the skirt to the bodice.

Then, I trimmed the excess fabric away from the waistband.

I look kind of gross here. It was the end of the day and I didn't feel like reapplying makeup!

It fits better now!

The End