New Technique for Stabilizing T-Shirts

I’ve been making a LOT of T-shirt quilts lately. One of the questions that comes up a lot (mostly from other quilters): Do you use any stabilizer/interfacing? To interface or not to interface? This can be a hot button issue among T-shirt quilt makers. I’ve read opinions on both ends of the spectrum. I’ve seen posts from makers who say that if you do use interfacing, you are incompetent and only doing this to make it easier on yourself at the expense of a nice soft quilt. The other end of the spectrum would be that if you don’t interface you’re skipping that step because you’re trying to cut corners with costs, and your outcome will suffer.

Where am I on this spectrum? I like to think I’m in the middle. I don’t care if other T-shirt quilt makers use a stabilizer or not. Full disclosure – I’ve never hired someone to make me a T-shirt quilt, and I probably never will. I would just make it myself. So, I can’t say for sure what I would do as a buyer. BUT, I probably wouldn’t worry so much about the use of or lack of interfacing. When you’re choosing a maker, look at the quilts they’ve made. Do they look good? I’ve seen quilts that look nice as well as quilts that look… not so nice from makers on both sides of the spectrum. I have a post on choosing a T-shirt quilt maker here.

So, do I use stabilizer? The answer is yes. The softness of your T-shirt quilt is definitely an important factor, but I believe that lightweight flexible interfacing exists. Check out the video below of me picking up a shirt I interfaced with P44f. You can see that the shirt still has a nice drape. If it were super stiff, I wouldn’t be able to do that. I’ve tried lots of interfacings both cotton and non-woven, and I do change between interfacings depending on what I’m interfacing and why I’m interfacing it. What interfacing to use is enough for it’s own post; I’ll save that topic for another day.

So why am I experimenting with other stabilization techniques?

My beef with using fusible interfacing is not that it makes the shirts stiff. Obviously some interfacings are stiffer than others, and some would make the T-shirt quilts stiffer and less flexible. My opinion is that the way interfacing works to stabilize the quilts is not necessarily by making them stiffer. We all know what opinions are compared to, and everybody has one of those… From my experience, I feel like the interfacing works because you’re sticking something stretchy and uncooperative (T-shirts) to something that’s not so stretchy and uncooperative.

My beef with the fusible interfacing is that it takes so long to fuse it to the shirts. You can’t just iron it onto the shirts. You have to press it, holding the iron down for 10-15 seconds or longer depending on the product you’re using, and repeat this over the entire surface you’re interfacing. With an iron this takes forever. I have a heat press, and this speeds up the process SOOO much. BUT, I still feel like it takes too long given the amount of quilts I have on my schedule. This is why I decided to experiment with other ways to stabilize the T-shirts.

Some things I considered

Before I get too far into talking about my experimentation, I have to make something clear. I DO NOT experiment on my customers’ quilts. I experiment with scraps, my own shirts, and t-shirt material that I buy from the fabric store.

I decided to run with my theory that the interfacing works by sticking the shirts to something that isn’t so stretchy. My plan was to use spray baste to baste the T-shirts to something more cooperative. My college degree falls under the Bachelor of Science. I was taught that before you do your own study, you should research to see if anyone else has tried it first. I was only able to find one post where someone tried this, but it was not the same style quilt as mine. The quilting was only around the edges of the blocks. I decided to try this myself with more quilting, similar to what I use in my T-shirt quilts.

Here’s the little mini quilt I made for my experiment. You can see that there’s a decent amount of quilting.

The biggest question here? What should I baste the shirts to? I’m going to be trying out a few more materials over the next few months.

I thought about using some white quilting cotton, but I anticipated a few disadvantages with this one. Adding a layer of quilting cotton would basically mean adding an extra quilt top into the quilt. This would be heavy. Some people like a heavier quilt, and some don’t. Another factor is the cost. Fabric isn’t cheap. Even so, I do intend to try this. I have some pretty prints I bought for this. Hopefully I’ll be able to show you that project soon.

I considered basting the shirts directly to the batting and cutting the pieces from there. I’m not so sure this would work. If basting to the batting was enough, then T-shirt quilts wouldn’t be such fickle beasts that needed stabilizing. Also, this makes for a lot of extra bulk at the seams because you’re catching batting in your 1/4″ seam allowances. I did try this with a few small squares. I was surprised by how well they cooperated. I quilted it with some easy wavy lines with just my presser foot. Typically, I’d use my walking foot for something like this. So, I was impressed by the lack of annoying folds and puckers. I still need to try this with some free motion quilting to see if it cooperates for that. I anticipate that this technique will not be very forgiving since the pieces are so much thicker. I also think it will be difficult to deal with the extra weight of the batting while piecing a quilt with lots of partial seams like my T-shirt quilts have. However, I do intend to try this technique with some larger pieces because the idea of my quilt top being already basted to the batting when I finish piecing it is pretty appealing.

What did I end up using for the mini quilt in this post?

This is actually pretty ironic. In the end I decided to spray baste my T-shirt scraps to the P44f, a lightweight fusible interfacing. Cost would be a disadvantage with this technique because you’re using both interfacing AND spray baste. Depending on how many T-shirt quilts you make, the time factor may make this worth it for you. This was MUCH quicker than fusing the interfacing to the shirts, even with my heat press. Another time saver is that it’s easy to smooth out any wrinkles while you baste the shirts; so this would save the time it would otherwise take you to iron the shirts prior to interfacing them.

The big question here is if the spray baste holds well enough to keep the shirts cooperating for you. In my experiment, I did my best to sabotage this technique. After all, I want to see how well it holds up.

First, I used Franken-batting – overlapping/unjoined Franken-batting. I’ve found that regular quilting cotton does not mind this technique, but T-shirt quilts are fickle little beasts. They need extra motivation to cooperate. I say this lovingly because T-shirt quilts are sort of my babies. We spend lots of time together. I love them, but I have to be honest. They are looking for a reason NOT to cooperate. I suppose thick spots in the batting are as good a reason as any. The photo below is a closeup of one tiny fold where I was quilting over the batting overlap. You have to look close to see it. I took that picture before I washed the mini quilt. It’s even less noticeable after being washed and dried. The overlapping batting can be seen in this little video I posted on instagram.

Second, I tried to sabotage this by using fairly dense quilting. Quilting a little farther apart can hide a lot of stretchy issues because you can move things around so that you don’t end up with folds. Some of the weirdness this leaves can be lost in the crinkles from the dryer. You can tell from the back of this little mini that I used a decent amount of quilting.

This quilted up pretty smoothly. I did worry about putting this little guy in the dryer. Since I didn’t fuse the interfacing, the glue didn’t melt. I’m not sure if the un-melted glue washes away in the washing machine. If the glue survives the washer, will the heat from the dryer fuse it? Will this make the quilt look weird because of spotty or misaligned fusing? I’m not sure… The quilt turned out great – no weirdness from the interfacing to be seen. I’m not sure if this would work as well for those who use minimal quilting such as ditch quilting or only quilting around the edges of the blocks.

My conclusion

Spray basting the T-shirt quilts to a light weight interfacing before cutting the pieces seems like a promising technique. For me, the time saved definitely justifies the cost of a can of basting spray. I do feel like I need to try this on some of my old shirts in a larger quilt before I use this technique on anything I’m selling.