Bari J.

Bijoux T-Shirt

The other night I was sitting around watching HGTV and this T-shirt idea popped into my head for no reason at all. I love how it turned out and best of all, it took just about 30 minutes to make.

You'll need:

1 t-shirt

a fat quarter of Bijoux Dream Catcher in Fuschia

a fat quarter of Applique Foundation

a glue stick

thread

sewing machine with Free Motion quilting

iron

 

How to:

1. Cut the motifs from your fat quarter.

2. Lay them out on your t-shirt, and glue in place with glue stick. Heat set with a hot iron.

3. Place applique foundation under the t-shirt on the inside for stability (you can pin it in place).

4. Being careful to keep your t-shirt flat and without stretching, free motion quilt the applique in place.

5. Pull the applique foundation from the inside of the shirt. You don't need to get in out from the stitching. This particular foundation is starch/paper based and it turns to a pulp when you get it wet. Eventually with washing it will be entirely gone. In the meantime, you won't even notice it's there. 

6. Repeat for each applique.

Double Mitered Borders Video

Double Mitered Borders Video How To...    

The Tea Delights print from Splendor 1920 whispers to me... "please make me into a table cloth"... She's not sly about it either. She's loud. She wants to be put on a table. Napkins, tea towels, table clothes, runners, place mats... She's screaming at me. 

As you know I've obliged with napkins... and I also caved and made a table cloth. I was going to hem it, but I'm thinking I'd like a heavy table cloth, so it's going to get quilted. I'm thinking a flannel back... maybe no batting at all so it hangs nicely without being too thick. I don't want it to look like I threw a quilt on the table. So, the jury is out on that.

However, the point of this post is to show you how to add double (or any multiple) mitered borders to a quilt. Like I did with this table cloth. It's really easy as you'll see in this video. The hardest part is figuring out how long to make your borders. 

Once you've got them cut, sew them together and just treat them as one border.

The formula is in the video, but I thought I'd put it in writing here as well.

Decide how wide your borders will be first. Then figure out how wide they will be once sewn together.

To figure out how long each piece should be use this formula:

(finished width of border) x 2  +  (unfinished WIDTH of quilt) + 1" = length of border for quilt width side

Do the same for the unfinished LENGTH of the quilt...

(finished width of border) x 2  + (unfinished LENGTH of quilt) = 1" = length of border for quilt length side

And, here's the video explaining the whole process... Happy sewing!