Mommy Angst and a T-shirt quilt tutorial

That beautiful baby is leaving for college Sunday. Am I going to miss her? You bet. Am I going to let this simple fact of life that we have been preparing her and ourselves for for 18 (almost 19) years destroy me and leave me an emotional wreck? Absolutely not. I will miss coming home from work or having her come home from school or her job and talking, laughing and sharing the stories of our day. I’ll miss the simple things like eating together, shopping together, and watching tv together. Those things aren’t over, they will just be different and in a different place. Now she will have new people and experiences to share with me and commiserate over together. Just like when she went off to elementary school for the first time or took her first trip away without us, she came home with new experiences to share with us and it made all of us better people and strengthened our relationship.

Am I going to worry about her? Probably. But not ridiculously. I’ve never been a helicopter Mom. I know she’ll face difficult decisions and difficult situations but I have confidence in her as a person that she will come through them stronger and better in the end. To me that’s the point of life and growing up. She has a maturity and sense of self that has always been beyond her years. She’s going to be fine and I’m going to continue to be unabashedly proud of her and in awe of all she has done and will do. I’m excited to see where her life takes her.

Now that I got all the heart wrenching sappy stuff out of the way I will get on to the creative, crafty stuff!

Last summer Sarah decided to try her hand at making herself a T-shirt quilt out of all the miscellaneous shirts she’d collected through the years. In typical teen fashion, she didn’t want my advice or to follow the rules. She figured she’d do it her way and be just fine with the results. If she didn’t care if the final results were perfect and wanted to experiment who was I to say it was wrong? That is how creativity works, just play around with something and see what happens. That is one area that I feel like I was pretty good at in the parenting game, letting my children experiment creatively and make discoveries on their own. I was always there to offer advice or input when I was asked but otherwise, just sit back and see what they come up with. It was almost always enlightening for me too. I can’t count the times they would come up with something completely amazing that I never would have thought of because I was too stuck in following the “rules” and doing things the way they were “supposed” to be done. My advice to creative types, make art with children and don’t make them follow the rules.

All that said, the summer ended and she had lost interest in this project. The Tshirts had been cut up into squares (not all exactly the same dimensions and none of them stabilized) and some had been hand-stitched together in columns. There were also new shirts added to the collection that she wanted to include. She got busy with her Senior year and the project sat neglected. It happens. Then eventually she came to me and asked if I could finish it for her because it meant a lot to her but she just couldn’t make it a priority right then to do it herself. She may have also realized that her methods may not yield the most stable result. She told me that she knew it wasn’t done the way it was “supposed” to be done and she wasn’t all that concerned with the final results being perfect, she just wanted it done. Isn’t that the way with kids sometimes? They make a mess and then want Mom to come in and be the hero and fix it all. Again, it happens. And depending on the situation, we go in and fix it. It’s what we do as Moms.

So I was faced with a bag of cut up Tshirts, some hand stitched together with a wonky whip stitch and a handful of other shirts still intact and the job of putting it all together into a cohesive whole. Were I to have started this project from the beginning I probably would have looked for tutorials online, bought a book and some supplies from work and done it the way it had been done hundreds of times before. But that ship had sailed and I had to get creative.

Number one, stabilizing the knits, couldn’t do it at this point without it being a real hassle. The squares had been cut and to try to put fusible interfacing on the backs and keep them square would have been next to impossible. Also I really didn’t want to rip out all that hand stitching. Did I also mention I was on a bit of a time constraint? What I decided was that the reason most quilters interface the Tshirts is because they are approaching this project in a traditional way. They want the knit fabric to behave like woven. I have lots of experience now with sewing knits on my serger, that’s what differential feed is for  one of the reasons I have this extra machine. And hey, BONUS! The serger will also trim the seam as I sew and cut off all the wonky hand stitching!

This is what I started with.

This is what I ended up with after I went over all the hand sewn seams and then added on the new Tshirts cut to size. Fast, simple, easy and no need to stabilize because the serged seams are designed to stretch. The traditional way to make a Tshirt quilt requires interfacing because a straight stitched seam has no give and when the knit fabric is pulled on it will stretch but the stitches won’t and you’ll get popped seams. A serged together Tshirt quilt is soft, stretchy and strong.

The next step was to back the quilt. Because I wasn’t doing this like a traditional quilt I didn’t need to make a traditional quilt sandwich with batting and cotton backing. I wanted this blanket to be one of those ones that she could take to football games, on a picnic or camping and wrap up in and be warm and easy care. I bought some anti-pill polar fleece to back it. Nice thing about this is that it is wide enough to cover the back without piecing, durable, and washable without any special care.

I laid the fleece out right side up (is there really a right side to fleece?) and placed the quilt top face down on top. I carefully smoothed everything out and squared it up with out stretching or distorting. Then I pinned like a mad woman!

Using my walking foot and taking my time I sewed around the perimeter leaving an opening for turning. I could’ve used the serger again but it was a pretty bulky seam because of the thickness of the fleece and I thought my regular machine with a walking foot would handle it better.

Here’s a tip for when you need to leave an opening for turning. Sew from the raw edge to the depth of the seam allowance and then pivot 90º and continue to sew seam. When you get to the other end pivot and sew off the edge. This helps the raw edges of the opening to turn in evenly and neatly.

 

Once it is sewn all the way around, trim corners and any uneven edges and turn right side out. Slip stitch the opening close. The final step is to top stitch around the perimeter to keep the edges neat and to stabilize it a little more. At this point I decided I was done and that it didn’t need any additional quilting. The texture of the fleece holds the front and back together just fine without any additional quilting in the middle of the quilt. If I thought Sarah was going to use this on her bed every night I would probably hand tie it throughout with floss or yarn or do some small sections of machine quilting to hold it together. But as we say around here, “good enough for what it’s for.”

I hope this mini-tutorial helps take the pressure off a sewist or two who are faced with a project that needs to get done now but seems impossible to do “the right way” within the time constraints. We need to stop putting pressure on ourselves to do things perfectly every time. Sarah is very happy with her quilt, for her it is perfect. She was also relieved that I was able to do it for her without getting stressed out about it not being the way I would’ve done it and that I didn’t tell her she’d messed it up too much.

When I look at the finished quilt I see memories. Concerts and plays we attended. Clubs and church trips she participated in. These are the experiences she had so she would grow up into the well rounded person she is today and that will lead her to continue these types of things in the future. Sunday isn’t the end. It is just the beginning of another exciting leg of our journey. We’ll just be traveling in separate cars for a while now. Traveling mercies dear child. Always know that Mom will always be here to help put the pieces back together if you ever need me to help.