A quilt made from someone's clothes begins with a box of fabric that was never meant to be cut into pieces, and I will leave the reason for such a quilt right where it belongs, because what I want to talk about happens on the cutting table. A good deal of what comes out of a box like that is knit. Jersey, sweatshirting, the soft cotton of a shirt worn until it went thin across the shoulders. Knit stretches in every direction, which is exactly why it was comfortable to wear and exactly why it misbehaves the moment a rotary cutter comes near it.
The answer is interfacing, and most of us know that much already. What I found worth watching was the order. The lightweight interfacing goes onto a large flat area of the garment first, fused down while that area is still whole and still lying calm, and only then are the pieces cut out of the stabilised region. The stabilising comes before the cutting, not after it.
That order is not a matter of preference, it changes what you end up holding. Cut first and the shape has already gone, because the fabric shifted under the blade and the piece came off the table slightly out of true. Fusing interfacing to it afterwards undoes none of that. It sets it. You are left with a piece that is beautifully stable and permanently the wrong shape, which is a worse position than the stretchy piece you began with, because now it cannot be coaxed back.
Here is what carries across to any quilt built from clothing:
- Fuse to the area, then cut from the area. Work out roughly where your pieces will come from, fuse a generous flat region that covers all of them, and cut inside it. The interfacing is then doing its work during the cut itself, which is the only moment at which it can prevent anything rather than record it.
- Let the garment choose the weight. A heavier golf shirt arrives with a good deal of body of its own and asks for a light interfacing, just enough to stop the stretch. A thin, well worn t shirt has almost no body left in it, so it wants something of a middling weight to bring it up to a fabric that behaves under your hands the way a woven cotton does.
- One interfacing for everything is what pulls a quilt out of step with itself. If every piece gets the same weight no matter what it came from, the blocks finish with different amounts of body, and you feel that while you are piecing and see it once the top is together. Matching the weight to the source is how you get pieces that behave like one another.
- Decide it at the cutting table, because the quilting will ask. A stabilised piece holds its shape when the quilt finally goes under the needle. A piece that still stretches will travel as the stitching crosses it, and at that stage nothing can be done to bring it back. The choice made before the first cut is the one that shows up at the very end.
What stays with me is how much of this is settled before a single seam is sewn. The pieces coming out of a box of clothing are all unlike one another, in weight, in age, in how much wear they have had, and the fusing step is where you quietly bring them onto common ground. Get the order right and everything after it is calmer.
If you have made a quilt from someone's clothes, I would love to know how you handled the knits, and whether you fused before cutting or found your own way round it. Tell me in the comments, I always learn something from them.
