FO: Soccer Ball Quilt

It's finished!  And it's called "The Soccer Ball Quilt," and it was named by my 4-year-old.  These are some of my old soccer shirts.  I struggled mightily with how to design this quilt, given the various sizes of the designs and my utter inability to get squares to come out 18.5".  

I didn't want to use stabilizer on all of the t-shirt parts, and I didn't run into much trouble with the t-shirt fabric.  I made sure that I wasn't ever seaming t-shirt to t-shirt - everything is seamed together with quilting cotton.  Making the big squares went so well that I used some of the excess tie-dye material as colored fabric for the square in the bottom right, and that went just fine, too. 

A shot of the full thing.   It's about 54"x62".  The little blotty square is the back of a t-shirt that has a bunch of signatures on it.  Blotted out what are probably mostly obsolete maiden names by now. 

Ribbon Star

The big patterned squares are a ribbon star, churn dash, and X marks the spot.  These shirts were from 20+ years ago, so I decided to use a very old bit of stash, too, which is the blue heart/leaf batik that I got at Joanns slightly less than 20 years ago.  I had a bunch of fat quarters of it, and used up nearly all of it.  

The back is a recent purchase from a LQS (the black and white flower), more batik, and some Cyber Monday yardage from Connecting Threads (the green).   With the borders, I didn't quite have enough batting without cobbling some together, so the last little bit of January's spending money + a 50%-off coupon got me some Pellon Cotton with scrim off of the big old roll.  I felt like I was taking a gamble, because I'd never used that kind before, but I really love the crinkle that it ended up with.  

The batting was nice and flat, too, which is more than I can say for the kind that comes in bags.   I pin-basted most of the quilt and spray-basted the t-shirt fabric so that it would be less likely to shift around.  I quilted this with an all-over loop, and there was only one big expanse of t-shirt (around the signatures) that got a little bunchy.  I can live with it. 

Quilt Stats
Style: T-shirt quilt without stabilizer
Size: 54"x62"
Batting: Pellon 100% cotton with scrim (off the roll at Joann's)
Thread: Essential Pro (for piecing and quilting)
Binding: Double-fold machine sewn to front and hand-sewn to back


Linking up with crazy mom quilts for Finish it Up Friday.  Happy crafting!