Saturday, October 18, 2014

Samantha's T-Shirt Quilt - UF Sigma Kappa

As Samantha headed into her Senior year of college, we started talking about making a t-shirt quilt as a keepsake reminder of her years at University of Florida in the Sigma Kappa sorority.  Here is the finished product.
UF Sigma Kappa T-Shirt Quilt
UF Sigma Kappa T-Shirt Quilt

Initially, Samantha was interested in making a quilt that had jagged edges, but as we started laying it out we realized that the blocks really needed to be separated with sashing.  That's when the idea of this stained-glass look came about.

To get started Samantha backed all of the t-shirt pieces with fusible interfacing to stabilize the pieces since the t-shirt material is stretchy.  Once she had that completed, we started cutting backing pieces for each front piece and creating "sandwiches" with batting.  This was the perfect opportunity for me to use up all of the left-over batting from larger quilting projects.

Layers for each block
Layers for each block
Once the blocks were complete, we started laying them out and created filler blocks where we needed.  This took some time because we wanted to be sure we didn't have too many of the same or similar colored blocks close together, as well as dispersing the various block sizes across the quilt.  We may have obsessed a bit too much over this step, but it was fun.

Next, I worked from block to block, free-motion quilting each one.  This gave me an opportunity to practice some new designs without the hindrance of a large quilt in my standard machine.

Once I had the blocks quilted, I was ready to assemble them.  I used 1/2 inch single fold bias tape, sewing a piece to both sides of one block, then attaching the top strip to the adjoining block, and the final seam was done by hand.  I could have sewn it by machine, but didn't want to worry about stray top-stitching.

The assembly was actually quite cumbersome because I didn't have definite sections in some places. This required me, in some sections, to partially attach the bias strips to a block so I could attach that to another section.  I worked it out.

The nice thing about this project was that once I had the blocks assembled, it was done!

Here are a variety of pictures, and check out the back!  Go Gators!








Free Pattern Alert!! Ironically, just as I was finishing this quilt, I came across this posting where a free pattern is offered for a very similar quilt.  Great idea!