T-Shirt Quilt - Start To Finish
Fall 2019
T-Shirt Quilts From Start to Finish
Leather & Lace Custom Threads
First of all, we want to introduce ourselves and tell you a little bit about us. We are a combination of women who happen to be related including Grandmothers, Mothers, and Daughters ranging in ages from almost 80 to 20-year-olds. Quilting has been a part of each of our lives since each of us were old enough to sit up in a chair! Tips, tricks, and lessons have been passed down for years and years. Our Family Business started in 2017 when we purchased our first longarm quilting machine. The machine is a Gammill Statler Longarm that is 14' in length. During the start of this business, we also purchased the Cadillac of all Embroidery Machines, a Husqvarna Designer Epic. It is an industrial sewing and embroidery machine. We had a good solid year of training with the two machines and now we are working Monday - Friday in the quilt room with all sorts of projects.
T-Shirt quilts are something that we take very seriously and use quality materials. We have made them for our girls, their friends and many clients in the past. Asking someone to make you a quilt out of your beloved t-shirts can be a scary thing to some, I mean they have to cut them up and sew them back together! We get it! So, we want to explain the whole process in this blog post to ease your mind. Compiling the details of what it takes to make a quality quilt and what we prefer to use is listed in detail below.
Difference between a blanket and a quilt:
Blanket and a quilt are two different things. A blanket is a top/front and a back piece of material. It will only have two layers with no batting in between the layers. Quilting has three layers: a top, batting, and a backing. We offer high-quality quilting with our t-shirt quilts.
(Photo Credit: TooCoolT-ShirtQuilts)
Difference between custom and edge to edge quilting:
Custom Quilting on our longarm quilting machine is specific quilting in certain areas that can very to be a pattern that is duplicated per block all the way to following the line of the shirt patterns.
Edge to Edge quilting is a pattern that gets duplicated over and over throughout the whole quilt.
(Photo Credit: TooCoolT-ShirtQuilts)
What you need to know about binding:
Binding is the finished edge and can be a variety of ways for the final look.
-Finished attached binding is a two-step process. We attach a biased strip of material to one side of the quilt and then sew it down on the other side leaving a professional-looking finished binding edge. This binding will extend the overall size of the quilt with the width size of the binding and will last the life of the quilt.
-Fold-over binding is a one-step process. We take the backing material and fold it up to the front and attach it. This is a cheaper way to do the binding but as you can see in the photo provided it does not have quite the professional finished look.
-No border binding is only optional with a blanket that has not been quilted. It does not look as well as the other two quilts.
(Photo Credit: TooCoolT-ShirtQuilts)
What you need to know about backing material:
This material can be a couple of different options depending on the overall style, look and feel you want to have for the quilt.
-100% Cotton
-50% Poly / 50% Cotton or a variety of the mix
-100% Polyester
We prefer 100% Cotton material when quilting for our clients it has the softest feel, wears well and is the easiest to work with. When purchasing your backing make sure you feel the material before you purchase or know a trusted business you are buying the material from. Some cheaper 100% cotton material can be thinner woven and will not have the same overall feel.
Poly/Cotton mix fabric has a somewhat feel of cotton yet it has enough polyester to keep it from wrinkling up.
Polyester fabric is really very inexpensive and will also give the finished look of inexpensive in the overall look and feel as well.
What you need to know about batting:
We carry two types of batting: 80/20 cotton batting and a poly batting.
Our cotton batting is a 80% cotton / 20% poly fused combination. It is known as the best of both worlds. This batting feels like cotton and is a thinner finished look on your quilt. The thin batting allows for easier washing, folding, and storing. The poly fibers in the 80/20 cotton batting make the batting stronger overall.
Our poly is puffier and more loosely woven together batting. This batting gives a different overall look to a quilt being that there are more high and low spots in the finished quilt. The quilting pattern is a big factor when using poly batting. Large areas can bunch up after washed multiple times. Many of our clients choose 80/20 cotton batting but few prefer the poly. We carry both for our clients to have options.
Start to Finish
Gathering your shirts is the first start! No matter if you have been in one group or multiple groups odds are, you have a group shirt. We love to customize items for groups, it gives a sense of belonging that we all enjoy being a part of. It helps us represent things that mean something to us. We wear statement pieces every day in our wardrobes and when we believe in something it is as easy as wearing a shirt for promotion. T-shirts are an item many people can customize and a broad range of people can wear them. This being said, the average person will have a variety of t-shirts in their lifetime and many of them will have sentimental value. This leads to the next step.
Grouping your t-shirts:
Gathering all of your shirts is the first really exciting part of the whole project. You get to go through feeling each shirt and remember all of the times you wore these beloved shirts! The next part, grouping, well that may be the hard part but if they mean a lot to you maybe you could do more than one!
Traditional // Puzzle // Shapes
- Puzzle -
Throw Measurements: W (54-60) - L (68-76) |
Twin Measurements: W (56-64) - L (84-100) |
Full Measurements: W (70-84) - L (84-100) |
Queen Measurements: W (76-84) - L (90-104) |
King Measurements: W (90-100) - L (90-104) |
Check out our full Facebook Album for more photos!
We have created this blog post to help inform you on all the ins and outs of what it takes to make a T-Shirt quilt.
The photos taken from the credited site came from: https://www.toocooltshirtquilts.com/blog and our collage photos are designed by us.
Thank you for taking the time to read about our options! Let us know if you have any questions and we will be happy to assist you.
Contact us by email: leatherandlacecustomthreads@gmail.com
or find us on Facebook: