Monday, October 12, 2015

Choosing Backing Fabric for a T-Shirt Quilt

The term tone on tone refers to a printed fabric that is made by combining different shades and tones of the same color.
Tone on tone fabrics often appear to be solid when viewed from a distance, but their printed motifs become recognizable on closer inspection.  Tone on tone fabrics  add subtle, visual texture to a quilt without the busyness of a multi-color print.
Personally, I rarely use a solid color fabric, because tone on tones serve the same purpose and do not appear as 'flat' as solids. Black is the exception, we do use a deep, dark saturated black as an accent border.

Friday, September 25, 2015

6 Tips For Selecting A T-Shirt Quilt Maker.

You do a search on Google to find someone to make a t-shirt quilt.  My goodness, there are so many websites, so many styles, so many prices.  How do you know who to select?  What questions should you ask?  How do you select a company to make YOUR custom t-shirt quilt from YOUR treasured t-shirts?

Thursday, September 24, 2015

T-Shirt Quilt Style - Order or Chaos?

There are two major styles of T-Shirt quilts.   What I refer to as  'Order' and 'Chaos'.  OK, that seems like an extreme comparison, but let's look at the difference between order and chaos as pertains to t-shirt quilts.

First of all, I grew up looking at quilts that two of my great-grandmothers and my grandmother made or were working on.  In high school, my favorite classes were  geometry, accounting, physics and silver-smithing   (I went to a great high-school- we also had  archery and canoeing as phys-ed options).   I was a computer programmer in the corporate world.   I like lists. I like to read Science Fiction.  OK, yeah, I am a geek. But, all of these studies involve science and ORDER.

How does that pertain to quilts you ask??

Traditional Style Quilt
T-Shirt quilts fall into these same categories.  A traditional quilt is generally created using uniform sized blocks that are laid out in columns and rows.  Traditional  t-shirt quilts will appeal to most people because their sub-conscious wants this order and the 'eye' wants to see things in an ordered way.
Random or Chaos Style Quilt
A random quilt can be done in many ways.  If you have ever looked at the random styled t-shirt quilts, you will either love 'em or hate 'em.  Couple of reasons for this.    It takes a lot of skill and creativity to lay out a random style t-shirt quilt in a pleasing manner.  Most people don't have that skill. There are a few t-shirt quilt providers out there that have formulas for creating these quilts, but, the problem is that the color  and value of the t-shirts is not taken into account.  Sometimes, the formula works, but more often than not, the resulting quilt just looks like chaos.

At T-Shirt Quilts of Texas we are known for our high quality 'TRADITIONAL" quilts and proud of it!  We have years and years experience looking at the shirts that you provide, and coming up with a pleasing and satisfying layout of the shirts.