Earlier this week I posted about our fun summer Tie Dye Party for Tulip's Tie Dye Your Summer Campaign.  We ended up coming home with about 10 dyed shirts.

Now, I know not everyone is a fan of actually WEARING their tie dyed creations, so I thought I would give you a quick photo tutorial on how to turn your tie dyed shirts into a quilt.

Stretchy knit t-shirt fabric is so soft, it makes for great quilts, but you need to know a few tricks on working with it.

The steps to making a t-shirt quilt are really pretty simple.

• 1. Cut the seams out of the shirt(s)
• 2. Open it up flat
• 3. To keep the knit from stretching and distorting during sewing, apply a lightweight fusible interfacing
• 4. Apply the interfacing with an iron (follow manufactures instructions)
• 5. Cut down the shirt into squares (Mine were random sizes, but your design is completely up to you)
• 6. Sew your squares into larger blocks and square them up.
• 7. (optional) Apply sashing between the blocks (I used solid black cotton quilting fabric to make the the tie dye pop, but you could use any additional fabrics you want)
• 8. Make a quilt sandwich (add backing fabric and batting.. or in this case I just backed it with a piece of polar fleece for a lightweight blanket. I didn’t add batting).  Quilt layers together.
• 9. Bind the edges and ta-dah!  You are done.

Here is my finished project:


This quilt (using one shirt and with a finished size of approximately 4x4) took me a single evening. I did machine quilt and bind it.   But even a beginning sewer could complete a similar one in a few evenings.

I am planning on doing a more detailed t-shirt tutorial in the future, for all you non-quilters (with seam allowances, cutting guides etc.)  But that is the beauty of this quilt.  It doesn't really matter.. the random dye pattern will hide a lot of flaws!

Sharing at these parties.

This was NOT a sponsored post.  Tulip did not ask me to write up this tutorial and I was not compensated.