Softball Player Quilt #1

This year a friend’s daughter, Autumn, is graduating from high school.  I have been asked to make a t-shirt quilt.  Autumn is a serious softball player and has been playing in traveling leagues for years.  I collected two boxes of t-shirts in January.  When I started prepping t-shirts I quickly realized I have enough t-shirts for two quilts.  I used two complete packages of stabilizer in prepping the t-shirts in the first box.  Actually, I had a handful of t-shirt’s leftover.  One package of stabilizer is 60” x 72”.  Normally a t-shirt quilt takes about a package and a half. 

I did have shirts that fit a 12 year old girl and t-shirts that were meant to be baggy on a high school senior.  I was able to use a simple row design with some blue fabric to augment any shirts that weren’t quite big enough for the row.  There are a couple of problems with softball t-shirts.  (1)  nylon jerseys – they don’t like to stick to the stabilizer; and (2) rubberized designs – I learned that the foot of the machine does not glide on the rubberized designs, it sticks and stretches the fabric.  And don’t forget the normal problem of t-shirts that stabilize well.  A lot of the time the problem is the shirts are not 100% cotton, they have some polyester in the thread used to make the fabric.

The backing is an RJR fabric from Bolines in Bloomington, Illinois.  Bolines has a great selection of fabric and sells fabric for significantly less than the average quilt shop.