How many times have you been to a craft show and seen an item and said, “I could make that myself”? Of course, you probably never end up making it, and I know this because I have been guilty of the same thing. We don’t seem to want to pay the price for home crafted items, but we don’t consider the costs of the supplies and we really don’t consider the time and effort spent making them.

I had a very sweet mother of a college student bring me the quilt top she had pieced from her son’s t-shirts. She warned me that she did not use stabilizer and that the quilt top had some puckers. I told her that there was no way I could get rid of the puckers and she insisted that she didn’t mind (as I was thinking that her son probably would mind). Against my better judgment, I started quilting the quilt. Well, it went from bad to worse as seen in the photo on the left. I finally decided that I couldn’t let this quilt leave my studio looking like it did. So I took a couple of photos and sent them to the dear lady and she agreed with me. So my husband and I took the whole quilt apart (which took more hours that I want to admit) and I remade the quilt from scratch. You can see the same t-shirt on the right. It was a lesson learned for the mother and for me. There’s a joke among quilt piecers that their longarm quilter can “quilt it out” if they make a mistake, but I’m here to tell you, we can’t.  This poor customer could have had me do the quilt to begin with and it wouldn’t have cost her as much as she ended up paying in time and supplies. So if you decide you want a t-shirt quilt and are not well-versed in sewing and how to do it, please leave it to the professionals.