T-shirt quilt, Part 3

I am soooo close to finishing my quilt but have not made the time to do so. I have made plenty of time for TV shows I do not need to watch, however. Oh, well.

Here are the things I have done since the last post. To refresh your memory, this is where I left off:

I finished putting iron on interfacing on all the pieces in between and then sewed everything together to finish the top. This was a little tricky because somehow the top of my quilt was half an inch narrower than the bottom. This may not seem like a big deal, but I had to work in the difference up the edges sorta evenly. The material still has some stretch to it, even with the interfacing, so it did not lay as flat as I wanted it to. In the end, I had to undo one of the long sides. I really dislike taking out seams, especially big ones. Yuck. I made sure to iron all the seams open before continuing.

In the end, I really like the top though!

I planned to just use fleece for the back and not put any filling in. I got creative at the fabric store and decided on two colors. I was good and washed and dried the fleece, then I trimmed off the edges and sewed the two pieces of fleece together using a stretch stitch. I am really glad I used the stretch stitching on the machine - it is much sturdier!

Then I remembered seeing something about how to do an easy binding for a quilt. The one quilt I made in 4-H did not have binding, as it was put together differently than serious quilters often put together their quilts. I put the quilt top on the fleece at an angle, again, just to be creative I suppose.

And cut the fleece 2 1/2 inches bigger than quilt top to give a 1 inch fleece edge to the quilt in the end (that was the plan). This is essentially what the finished quilt should look like.

Then I moved the top of the quilt. I do not recommend doing this. My bad. When I finally tracked down the tutorial I had found on doing an easy binding, it was too late. I did not understand how people bind quilts because (not to repeat myself or anything) the quilt I had made in elementary school was not put together that way. I am not a fan of hand sewing either, which is how quilt binding is often done, so this tutorial is more my speed.

Anyway, I laid the quilt top as smoothly as I could back on the fleece and pinned everything. Then I used a straight stretch stitch to quilt the long lines of the quilt (i.e., just sew up the edges of the columns of blocks). Action shot!

In the end, I had to trim more of the fleece off because I had moved the quilt top back there a few steps and it was not even all the way around.

The only thing I have left to do is fold over those fleece edges and sew all around the quilt though!

If you do a t-shirt quilt and use fleece, I do recommend using a stretch stitch for these final steps. I can tell that the material is not getting pulled as much as it would with a regular stitch, so hopefully the quilt will last longer!

Previous steps:
Part 1
Part 2