I have no particular fondness for t-shirt quilts, but when I have made them, I've tried to make the process interesting for me and make the quilt as light as possible by getting rid of the maximum amount of t-shirt fabric. I made a t-shirt quilt for Dan before he went off to Denison and one for Anna two years later when she went to Kenyon. Part of her quilt is visible in the picture above. I've blogged previously about my latest t-shirt quilt made last summer for Dan.
Our numbers were small yesterday, but that made it possible for everyone to spread out on two tables. I talked about stabilizing the t-shirt design first. (I use an iron-on woven stabilizer that I really like.)
After the design is stabilized, either solid or pieced borders are added. I talked about how I let the design speak to me about how to create the borders. For the "LA love it or eat it" t-shirt, I used a mottled green to match Godzilla and then paper pieced black and white equilateral triangle borders for the top and bottom. (Simulating teeth...get it!)
We had some interesting t-shirt collections: one participant was a counselor at the Governor's School for many years and used all of those shirts. Another woman had been to Russia several times and brought t-shirts she'd gotten there.
This same lady liked the paper pieced border idea and made one for one of her Russian shirts.
Another of the workshop participants was working with her son's sports t-shirts and it occured to me that she could add her son's name to the border using the wonderful free pieced alphabet developed by Tonya over at the Lazy Gal Quilting blog. When Bonnie Hunter visited our guild last year, she showed several of her quilts in which she'd used this alphabet.
Now I'm looking forward to show and tell at the guild meetings so I can see more of the work that was created in these workshops!
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