T-Shirt Quilt Along - Week 2 - Find Center of Logo & Cutting Out Your Blocks

hello you guys welcome to video number two of our quilt along series today I'm going to show you how to cut out your blocks and we're getting started right now [Music] you welcome back you guys we are in week two of our t-shirt clothing long series I trusted everything that's going smoothly and at this stage we should be ready to cut out our logos today I'm going to go over four different things I'm going to show you how to find the center of your logo I'm going to show you how to use the 15 inch square ruler to cut out your t-shirt block I'm also going to show you how you can use a straight edge ruler and your cutting mat to cut out your block and the fourth thing we're going to go over today is basic design and laying out all of your blocks getting ready for week number three where we're going to start sewing so let's go over the supplies you're going to need for this week let's go for the supplies and tools that we're going to use to cut out the blocks for our quilts I have a 15 inch Omni grid ruler I have a straight edge ruler and a cutting mat I of course have our rotary cutter we need some marking utensils to mark the center of your logos I like these because they're water-soluble and I have a dark one for the lighter colored shirts and a light one for their darker shirts but my go-to is this one and it has a piece of chalk all of these can be found at Joanne's probably your local quilt shop or maybe even Walmart if you want to check those out all of these wash out when we're done with our quilt and we throw it in the wash all of our markings will be gone so that's why I really like these you'll need I use washi tape masking tape would be fine also but I like to mark on our cutting mat if we're not using the square ruler and we're using a straight edge ruler marking a 15 inch marks and a center mark really speeds up the cutting process and helps you stay very accurate when we're cutting out our blocks the last thing I recommend is a sheet of paper where you draw a grid I have these grids that I came up with some time ago but this really aids if you do not have a design wall or the floor space to lay out the design of your quilts or have no desire to crawl around moving all the blocks around till you come up with a desired look this makes it very easy you could sit in the evening and color in the different colors of your blocks that are customized to your quilts until you come up with the design on paper that you really like versus moving all the blocks around so if you do not have the space to lay out your quilt that is completely fine you can do all of your design on a piece of paper if you do not get this grid just simply draw out a quilt bread that is four inches or four blocks across and five down and that gives you our 20 blocks at this point we're ready to get started I'm going to go ahead and clear this stuff out and I'm going to start to show you how to find the center of your logo for your quilt blocks we are ready to go ahead and start marking the center of our logos if you're using the 15 inch ruler you can a mark the center of your ruler and you can almost forgo marking the center of a lot of your logos because you would just Center it up with the center mark and you're ready to start cutting if you're using the straight edge ruler to cut out your shirts you probably want to go ahead and work all of your shirts just to aid in that process the first thing I like to do when I'm trying to find the center of my logos is to take a ruler and it start with with the longest part of your logo so from here to here would be the longest part and I measure that and we are right at 16 inches so I'll go ahead and take my marker and half of 16 is 8 so I'll make myself a small mark my marker doesn't want to work at the 8 point mark and then find the widest part of your low Oh which would be from here to here and measure that out and we are at about 14 inches so I'm going to mark half of that is seven so right in the middle seven inches 14 and 14 and from there we have our marks and you can just draw yourself a line that indicates the halfway mark both vertical and horizontal that extends past your logo so when you're lining up with your lines on your mat it's easier if your lines come closer to the edge of your shirt and so just like that we have marked the center for this shirt I'll bring another one over again if you're using your square edge ruler you could just line it up the center mark on your ruler with the center of your logo and you're ready to cut for this one we will mark it with a chalk marker because it's a dark colored shirt again I take the tallest mark of our logo and measure that and we are right at six inches so half of 6 is 3 I'm going to go ahead and just mark right through that to mark our halfway from vertical and then we take the widest part of our logo and we are right at 7 inches I'm going to mark it down here so half of seven is three and a half and we will mark that section there we're ready to go ahead and draw our vertical line matching up with the mark that we made and our horizontal line just like that we know that this is the center of our logo and our lines come out to the edge so we are done with this one we will mark another one again if we're using the straight edge ruler there's our center mark we could go ahead and cut that out just like that for this one let's see I want it's not going to all fit into 15 inches you see some of this is gone so I'm going to have to determine what exactly I want in my quilt block and this is pretty much it okay we'll find the center is about 11 inches so we will make a mark at 5 and 1/2 and let's mark the length at about 12 let's see no 13 inches because I I'm going to go ahead and get rid of some of this down here we will mark it at 13 inches so 7 and 1/2 will be our center point go ahead and let's see we'll mark our horizontal line we'll mark our vertical line and again that all of these markings will come out at the end when we wash our quilt let's do one more and I really wanted to show this shirt because a lot of people might have shirts similar to this that they want to include in their quilt however the logo is small and it pretty much towards the top of the block and we're going to have a lot of empty space here for this quilt I am completely fine with that I'm going to love this quote no matter what for a lot of other quotes I might have wanted to maybe cut this block out smaller and more custom fit to the logo but because we're doing doing a block style quilt we're going to cut it out at the 15 inches you can kind of see how this is going to look with the smaller logo up here and a lot of empty space down here and I'm perfectly fine with that so the tallest point in this logo would be two and a half inches so we will mark that and the widest part of this logo let's move it like that would be seven and we will mark at three and a half just like that alright go ahead and mark all of your shirts just the same way even if you're using the square edge ruler if this is your first quote I would go ahead and do this just to make sure you're more comfortable when you're actually cutting your shirts mark all the centers and we'll meet up I'm going to show you how to use the square edge ruler to start cutting your blocks yay alright we have gone through and marked all of our t-shirts with the center marks both horizontally and vertically and we're ready to start cutting we're going to start cutting with our 15 inch ruler 1/2 of 15 inches is 7 and 1/2 and so you know both from both directions which way is your center and at this point you simply line up the seven and a half inch marks on both the top and the sides with your lines and it's just that simple to line up with your square ruler the logo on your shirt and we're ready to start cutting okay you're going to grab your rotary cutter and please be very careful with these things they will cut you the first thing I like to do before I start cutting out my squares I'm going to get rid of some of this extra material down here just cut that off you can tell I need a new blade for a lot of quotes I save this I do a lot of collage style quilts and this would be used in different parts of the quilt so you could say that if you wanted to now I hold my ruler very tightly with a lot of pressure on my shirt while I'm cutting okay you don't want this to be slipping around while you're trying to cut out your shirt so taking your ruler against the edge of your square ruler take your cutter one side we're going to cut crossed I'm sorry as my arm gets in the way for this part but we're going to come again there we go and still holding with pressure without moving the ruler we're going to come see we're going to hold this down we're going to come along and cut this bottom section off and just like that we have our first block for our quilt so doesn't that look nice we will do one more with the 15 inch ruler our lines are very faint on this shirt you may or may not be able to see them again I'm matching up with the center both on the top and the sides to our pre marked lines there our logo is centered and it may look off centered because the heart is so dark and there's some empty space down here that's the Rope that I wanted to include in this blog so we are centered up and we're ready to start cutting I'm going to go ahead and cut because my blade is not sharp it doesn't like to go through the thickness of this I really need to go get some new blades for this again putting lots of pressure on your ruler we're going to start by cutting up the right side we're going to cut across the top we're going to cut down the left side it looks like I'm being very awkward in doing this but I'm trying not to hit the camera stand so really I'm really not this awkward when cutting out the t-shirt blocks i position my body so that it easily comes down the side but trying not to knock you guys around I do seem a little awkward in doing this it helps you could do this on a table where you could actually walk around the table and cut it from the other direction to make it safer to use this again holding lots of pressure and not shifting our ruler we're going to cut this bottom section off so just like that we've used the 15 inch ruler and you can see how quick that you can cut out your block using this ruler so if you're going to do a lot of block style t-shirt quilts I do recommend and investing in one of these I'm going to show you with one more shirt that we have not marked the center of how easy that square ruler makes the whole process we have not marked this one and with a little piece of tape of marked the center and so you can just visually figure out what you want included in your blog here's the center lock and you can cut out your logo that way just like that we have our third quote block cut it out they can see this really does speed up the process I'm going to show you now how to use a straight edge ruler and your cutting mat you have some of this extra stuff out of the way the straight edge roller and the cutting mat to cut out your blocks alright like I mentioned in the beginning of the video when I'm not using any template ruler to cut my squares I like to mark on my cutting mat how big I want my block to be so you can see I've marked 15 inches and then I measured in half way and marked the center line at seven and a half inches this just peels right off your cutting mat when you're done on the other side of this mat I've actually written in permanent marker all the markings for my quilt because I do a ton of t-shirt quilts all different size blocks and so in permanent marker on the back side of this I have all my markings using the tape though if you don't want the permanent markings you can easily take that off when we're done so the first thing I do is we're going to cut the sides off so with our Center mark here we know that this line here is our half inch or our halfway mark we're going to take our talked mark and line that up with this line here which is seven and a half inches and we're going to make sure that that's straight you can stay I have to kind of fold that down so that I could see our 15 inch marks the first thing we're going to do is we're going to remove this side of the shirt and it really helps if you can see the bottom lines of your cutting mat so that you can line up everything straight I come over with my straight edge ruler and line it up directly with this line on the cutting mat and make sure it's straight all the way down and we remove this part of the shirt okay then we come back over to the left side of the shirt again marking with our line making sure everything is straight we remove that part of the shirt at this point we're ready to rotate everything and now we are marking or lining everything up with our horizontal line which is not going to live on this shirt that's because the logo is closer to the top so let's go ahead and move it this way so we're not completely centered because our logo is very close to the neckline and you'll find a lot of your shirts might be like that so I'll just bring it so that this straight edge is matched perfectly to the straight edge on the cutting mat and I make sure right here that we do not include any of this collar piece into our quilt so making sure that that's all lined up we're ready to go ahead and cut this block and like that we have this block that is ready to go I will show you one more we're going to most definitely want to get rid of some of this extra so we can see the markings of our cutting mat down here and we know that that's safe to do because we're going to be cutting up here and all of this is extra so I'm just going to go ahead and remove that out of our way again we're matching this vertical line and the center to the center line on our mat making sure that's nice and straight I'm going to fold this down so that I could see my markings for the 15 inches they're going to start from the right side lining our roller up with the cutting mat making sure everything is straight coming to the left side again putting pressure on a ruler so it doesn't shift while we're actually using the cutter and again we're going to turn vertically remember this shirt was the one with the logo towards the top much like the last one we know that we're not actually going to be matching this line up to the center we're going to be off-center and we're going to make sure this collar is not included so we're going to go beyond the 15 inch mark on the left and that'll give us 15 inches right about there 15 inches making sure your straight edge of your block is lined up to the straight edge on your cutting mat and then you're ready to go ahead and cut off the extra on this shirt [Applause] okay we have our fifth block that is all ready to be sewn into our quilt now if you guys have any questions about this part make sure to ask them below if I get a lot of questions I will redo this part or maybe show some different tips that would help you out I'm going to go ahead and cut out all of our t-shirts and we're going to meet back for the design a part of our quilt all right we are in the design phase of our quilt congratulations you have all 20 of your blocks already cut yay hopefully no boo-boos on the fingers from the rotary cutter and now we are on to designing and laying out our quilt blocks to form our quilts I find these grids extremely helpful when mapping out like my quilt so if you don't have this grid set go ahead and draw out a grid grab yourself some colored pencils or crayons or markers and you can go ahead and color map out the layout of your quilt just a couple tips that I wanted to point out when laying out your quilts I try to make my quilt colors in a checkerboard pattern meaning I like to rotate from dark to light dark to light dark to light dark to light and sort of a checkerboard pattern throughout my quilt now sometimes your quilt blocks you may have more dark than lights and that's okay try to place them so that you don't have two of the same color blocks right next to each other and that just helps your eye visually go around your quilt without being drawn to any specific part of your quilt when you first look at it another tip to keep in mind if you have used a shirt where you used both the front and the back of this same shirt you're going to want to try to separate those in your quilt layout only because there shirt is the same color both blocks will be the same color and the theme of the logo is probably pretty close so you want to just try and separate those as much as you can I like to keep same color blocks apart from one another in the design layout and this grid really helps me do that without getting on my knees and moving a bunch of blocks around I do have a design wall so that makes it a little bit easier but you're still physically moving the blocks around until you get a design layout that you like that's one of the reasons I love this grid plus when we go to sew the blocks together you have sort of a layout to help you stay organized or you can take a picture of your blocks laid out and use your picture in case things get moved and shifted around in your workspace or if you have to pack things up and pull them out to do your sewing it helps you stay organized and helps you stake all your blocks stays where you want them to be who's ready for the big reveal of my quilt top let's go take a look tada the big reveal of my t-shirt quilt here we are you guys you should be at this phase in the quilt process all of our shirts are cut and we are ready to start selling next Sunday so I can hardly wait I did a video just the other day where Miss Olga had some questions about needles settings on your sewing machine and I talked about the thread that I'm going to use to sew our quilt top together so you might want to check out that video I'm going to put a link to that video in the description box below and if you're just joining us and you want to follow along and make your own t-shirt quilt I'm going to put a link to our first video in this series down below and I'm also going to put a link to my facebook in there so you can jump over to Facebook you guys I would love to see your progress photos it would be really nice if we could share it and inspire other people who are just starting to learn how to make quilts just starting in the sewing process everyone to start somewhere so we would love to be inspired by your pictures so I look forward to meeting you over there also if you're interested in it the grid set I will put a link to my Etsy shop down below where you can check out the different size grids that I have they come in really handy or again you can draw your own if that part helps you out in the planning process of our quilts again one more look I hope that this is going easily for you do not be discouraged if you come to a point where you are getting stuck or you're having issues walk away from it and come back the next day or the next time you have time dedicated to make your quilt and you'll find that things usually work out better when you take a break from them so feel free to comment below I hope that you guys have a wonderful rest of the week we will see you next Sunday and get your sewing machines ready to go bye you guys

Channel: Lisa Capen Quilts

Views: 40,688

Rating: 4.919373 out of 5

Keywords: tshirt quilt, tshirt quilt along, how to make a tshirt quilt, how to cut out shirts, finding center of tshirt logo, quilt design, how to tshirt quilt, lisa capen quilts, diy tshirt quilt, tshirt quilt tutorial, make a tshirt quilt, quilt tutorial, diy quilt, clothing quilt, how to make a quilt from clothes

Id: OHmAm8PtRpg

Length: 30min 37sec (1837 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2018