Filling in a Low Neckline Shirt for a T-Shirt Quilt

I spent the weekend working on Princess Five's Broadway Musical tee shirt quilt. It was raining all weekend and I normally prune my fruit trees this weekend every year but since I couldn't work in the yard, I happily finished stitching all the extras on the quilt squares and finished my label square on her quilt. 

There were lots of shirts that we found that had school names or dates for the show on the front of the shirts. Princess Five didn't want to have any dates or production names on any of her shirts so that meant I had to do a little sewing surgery on those squares. 

I would cut off the squares about 3/4 of an inch down into the lettering she didn't want and then cut out any words on the extra portion of the shirt and then pin the blank left over portion of the shirt back onto the first cut and stitch them back together and the small portion of the words that were left would be in the seam so I would just have the front of the shirt showing the show logo and then just a plain front so all the extra little words were now gone. 

I had to do that on about 10 of the shirts and it wasn't hard, it was just time consuming and then I had to change the color of thread to match the shirt as well so while I had the different colored thread on the machine, I sewed the neck / shirt tags and logos onto the "tag" square which I started doing a few quilts back as the tags on the branded shirts were so cute. Here is a link to the Snoopy tag square I did. This link shows a picture of the Super Hero tag square. 

I usually save that square until I am through cutting all the squares to size and probably should have as with the storms, my head is a bit fuzzy and I didn't leave a large enough seam allowance around the edges of that square and actually cut a few quilt shirt fronts short as I usually try and center the logo but in my fogginess, I cut too much off the top on a few and had a huge area at the bottom and no seam allowance on the top edges of a few squares. 

It is so hard when I want to get something done and the health makes me not be able to function as well as I would like but for the most part, I finished sewing anything needing sewing on each square and got all the squares cut to the right height and considering there are about 40 squares on the quilt, that is getting lots done. 

Now, I just need to cut the squares to the right width making all the rows match up and the squares in the row line up. It takes a bit of math skills in geometry to align all the squares up and cut of just the right amount in each row. I usually fold down the edges making the rows all look even and lined up before cutting anything so that I make sure that all the shirts in the row won't have something cut off to fit. We usually put all the tall shirts in one row so we can make that a center row on the quilt and then go down in size by row. I usually like to mix skinny and tall rows in through the quilt but she wants the smaller rows at the bottom and her favorite shirts in the center so that is what we are doing.

I made a video of me showing how to fill in a neckline on a shirt that has a low neck. I have done this with other t-shirts on different quilts by just putting a piece of the back of the shirt in the neck and sewing but this "Lion King" quilt was a bit harder as we wanted to include some of the print so I cut off some of the sleeves to use in filling the neckline for this t-shirt quilt square and I think it came out super cute. 

Watch the video and let me know if you have any questions. I am happy to be finally working on the quilt and getting it done and want to finish it before Princess Five heads out for her mission in just under a month. I have so much going on but am excited for her to have this before she goes. She keeps telling me how excited she is about it and how cute it is looking. I can see she is super happy with all the squares we were able to find and I think it will be something she will always enjoy. 

Thanks for watching. Have a Blessed Day!