Updated from here: this is sooooo hard for me. I really hate making things bigger than me.
What happened was that I went to the thrift store a few weeks ago and saw a pink fleece blanket (stained on both sides) and thought, "Hey, I could just buy this and sew T-shirts to it, instead of going out and buying fifty tons of interfacing and batting and more fabric to make a real quilt!" I loathe interfacing and real quilting is not my joy in life, so I was pleased with myself for this idea. Also, it cost $4 compared to racking up like $100 on Proper Quilting Supplies.
Problem #1: the quilt is an interesting size... rectangular. I think it came out to 72 inches x 80 inches. Ergo, by Doing Math I eventually figured out that I could use a lot of 12x12 squares, but then I'd also need some 6x12, and then a few 8x12's if I wanted to have some 20x12s to make a quillow...
Problem #2: I eventually figured out that making a 20 inch wide pillow pocket was just not gonna work or happen with T-shirts. Even if I subbed in some regular fabric. Just too complicated.
Problem #3: trying to fit shirt logos/sizes that were over 12x12.
What I ended up with was 6 rows on each side, with 4 12x12s and 1 6x12 in each row. I thought I'd be short on shirts, then I ended up cutting up more shirts than I could use. God, I hate math.
EXCEPT:
Problem #4: remember how I really hate interfacing? How I don't feel like it makes fabric all that stiff really?
Well, T-shirt fabric is really super wiggly when you cut it apart. So the boundaries of all of that fabric wiggled and shifted like hell when trying to pin it together. I ended up taking a day off from work and spending the entire day (7.5 hours) just trying to lay out the squares and pin them together into rows. I had to do a lot of adjustments. Sewing them together didn't nearly take so long as that.
I spent last weekend pinning the rows to each other for one side of the blanket, still adjusting for more wiggles. Happily, that only took me about 3 hours, including the sewing.
One more side to go. Then I have to figure out how the hell I'm going to sew the two tops to the blanket. I'm sure the machine can't handle that level of thickness and then something bad will probably occur, like me doing handsewing with a thimble.
Anyway, this is side 1 so far:
And here's some closeups of the shirt logos, if you care:
Comments