T-shirt Quilt
My first ever quilt project was a t-shirt quilt. Experienced quilters will be asking "why would you do that to yourself?" right about now, and they wouldn't be wrong. It was a really difficult project to take on for a first quilt, because t-shirt material is stretchy. It's so hard to keep the tension right when you're quilting over it, and even when you're basting (before the sewing part even starts).
One of my friends is an amazing quilter. She free quilts and comes up with the most gorgeous works of art. She also makes beautiful quilts for your bed. As soon as I saw some of her work, I asked if she could teach me.
The issue is I have been afraid of sewing machines since I was in school! For some reason, I did a couple of projects on the school machines and I just couldn't get them to work. They'd keep breaking or the thread would knot, I found it too hard to regulate the pedal speed, and I ended up being scared of, and frustrated by, the machines themselves. It's taken quite a while, and an opportunity from another friend to buy a decent sewing machine, to start to get over that aversion.
My quilting friend was keen to help. I told her I'd like to sew some of my old t-shirts into a quilt and she set out the steps for me. To her credit, she did say how hard it would be, but she stuck with it anyway when I said that was what I wanted to do. She shared some of her material and batting with me, and helped me to do each part.
We talked through quilting options, and I decided that for my first project I would stick to a straight design, which would allow me to concentrate on getting everything else right. Then when it came to working out what to do with the edges of the quilt, my friend suggested I could hand sew a border. I agreed, and it became a nice feature of the overall design.
I felt very proud when I finished it. Admittedly it wasn't very big and it wasn't perfect, but it had been a challenge and I had taken a long time to do it. Plus isn't it always lovely to be able to say "I made that"?
