Going on a Denim Break

Hello friends of first Fridays!  This is your old pal TJ from Studio Mailbox.  I’m here on the first Friday of every month to bring you a dose of sewing humor and check in with this fabulous creative community.

For those of you who’ve been following my posts you already know that my original plan was to eradicate the piles of denim in my studio and come out on the other side with a quilt.  Through this process I ended up with a beautiful lap quilt that I am so proud of.  I think of it as my “tester” quilt and I will use what I’ve learned making it when I’m ready to tackle a bigger one.  The problem I’m facing right now is that the quilt I made did not contain any batting.  At this point I’m hesitant to start a bigger, heavier denim project when I have zero experience with that extra middle layer.

As I walk into my work space and see the remaining stacks of jeans I think of the stories of people who’ve dated somebody at work.  At first it’s fun and flirty but once the relationship ends or cools the two parties actually have to keep seeing one another.  I’ve started walking into my sewing room and pointing at my jeans pile and saying, “it’s not over between us yet!”  Or the even more psycho and dramatic, “your life is nothing without me!” Needless to say the denim just sits there looking back at me, resigned to it’s fate.

Heather’s recent posts on T-shirt Quilts got my wheels spinning.  What if I stepped away from my denim dreams and fooled around with knits?  How about I use up all the old T-shirts in my son’s cupboard to make a quilt that has batting in it?  This way I’d work with something a little lighter and easier than denim the first time I try to put a whole quilt together.  Plus I’d be practicing on a twin size project and hopefully won’t be biting off more than I can chew.

The timing is perfect…if I get my act together this means I’ll have another Christmas gift ready too.  If anybody else wants to kick out a crafty holiday present jump in with me!  Heather’s first post spells out the materials and prep work of a T-shirt quilt.  There is a method to how one should whack off the arms and necks of the shirts and prep them with fusible interlining.  This of course prompted two separate trips to the fabric store.  Lucky me, flannel was 60% off this week!  This made it easy to decide what to use on the backside of the quilt.  Boom.

For lack of any reason whatsoever, I figured on 12″ squares plus an extra 1/2″ for seam allowance.  For my layout I am going to go with rows of 4 squares across and 5 squares down for a total of 20 squares.  At first I didn’t think I had enough shirts but some of the backsides have stuff on them too and there are just enough of them to save the day.  Everything was going smoothly until I went to cut a few of the smaller shirts.  It turns out that a couple of them are not 12 inches across the chest.  My bad!  I am going to either have to include the weird little half-moon seams where the t-shirt sleeves started (Would that be so wrong?) or I’m going to have to cut the graphic down smaller and piece some other knit around it log-cabin style in order to get my block to make 12.”  A couple of the shirts, like the tank top above will have to be given a border – they’re just too small!

The next doozie I did was assume that it was OK to cut both the front and back of the shirts at the same time.  Even though several friends have assured me that a T-shirt quilt is basic and easy apparently I can still manage to hose it up.  Here’s a little hint:  if you want to use the backside of any of your shirts first double check that the graphic is placed generally in the same spot on the back as it is on the front.  In my example, the backside (Red Guy) was up much higher on the shirt than the front side (Green Guy).  Of course I didn’t realize this because the backside of the shirt was face-down on my cutting table and I was working from the front.  I discovered my mistake after I made my cuts and noticed that Red Guy is nowhere near the center of the quilt block.  Don’t be like me people.

I cannot be 100% sure but this may or may not have been the point where I called Heather crying and insisting that “a T-Shirt quilt is NOT skill level one-and-a-half buttons!”  Of course she talked me back from the ledge and insisted I could handle it.

Apparently I have to hit rock bottom before I can decide to turn anything around.  So I pulled myself together and did some positive self talk using phrases like, “I own this quilt’s ass!” to psyche myself up.  I set aside my tiny ironing board (which I kid you not was salvaged from our old apartment dumpster), because I thought it was too small to fiddle around with.  And since I don’t have a solid history of thinking things through I decided to lay a towel down on my expensive rubber cutting mat and follow the directions for the fusible stuff.  I dampened my press cloth. I double checked I had the sticky side of the fusible against the inside of the t-shirt block.  I wielded my $6 Walmart iron fearlessly.  I counted to 10 over and over as I slowly moved around melting those two layers together.  Just as I was about snap my fingers around the room like Zoro I lifted up the towel and realized the heat had totally warped and buckled my cutting mat.  There was a hot second of panic before running to my kitchenette where I have a bunch of weights I use to weigh down things I’m gluing.  You have never seen a middle age woman run with weights like I did at that moment.  Perhaps when I’m done going through this quilt phase I’m going to try out something athletic.  Never fear dear readers of TSL, I obsessively checked the mat over the course of a couple hours and somehow miraculously it flattened back out.  I’m not sure if it would have anyway or if this was due to my quick thinking and cat-like reflexes.  I like to think it’s the latter.

As always my trusty studio sidekick, Lucky, was watching over me.  Thank goodness somebody was relaxed and unconcerned about my future as a seamstress.  In fairness, these mistakes confirm that I’m doing the right thing by switching gears to a smaller scale, lighter weight project.  Every time I want to smash my head down on the tabletop I tell myself, “bet you won’t do that again!”   Suck it up buttercup.

It’s crazy to think that the next time I check in with you we will be wrapping up 2014!  HO!  Pipe up and let me know what you’re working on and until next time keep pushing those seams through your machines… xx tj

TJ Goerlitz is a mixed media artist who pretends to be a seamstress whenever possible.  Come connect with her on her site, Studio Mailbox, her Facebook page, or in Pinterest.  Join in the story of the denim quilt every first Friday of the month where she will share her progress (or non-progress) right here with the readers of The Sewing Loft.