Quilted T-Shirts, Part One

(Click photo to enlarge)

Here's the deal; I've committed to making a t-shirt quilt for my DDIL. She went with me to pick out fabric for the background, borders, and sashing. That was the easy part. Because the designs on the t-shirts are all different sizes, I now have various sizes of blocks to work with.  As I cut the shirts apart, I noticed there was lots of leftover fabric, not to mention some 'holes' that would need to be filled.  My embroidery machine came to the rescue. I found some musical designs at Embroidery Library that will help fill in the blank areas.  This photo is the actual stitch-out of the designs I found, on some of that extra fabric.

T-shirts, as you know, are made of stretchy material which can be challenging to sew, when combined with non-stretchy fabric. The steps I took to help prepare the blocks for sewing and/or embroidering were:
1. heavily starch and iron, carefully so as not to stretch the block out of shape.
2. apply iron-on interfacing to the backside of the block, again careful not to stretch the block. I used a lightweight interfacing so the resulting quilt top would still be soft and snuggly.

Now comes the hard part; putting all those blocks into an attractive arrangement.