Using Liquid Starch for T-Shirt Quilts

{I originally wrote this post on March 19, the day before my dad passed away. I have not been on here much, as his loss has been a lot for me to bear. Please stay with me as I try to get back into the swing of things.}

In my last post I mentioned that I was now using liquid starch to stabilize my tees prior to cutting and sewing them. It is essential in t-shirt quilting to stabilize the shirts. If they are not stabilized, they WILL stretch and pucker during sewing and quilting. However, the desire for a soft, tee shirt-like quilt is the entire reason for making one! Iron on interfacing leaves the shirts a little stiff. It's not unpleasant or hard to the touch, just a little stiffer. Liquid starch will wash right out of the quilt once it's done. So if you want uber-softness AND stability, liquid starch is the way to go! Another bummer when it comes to iron-on is that it can get quite expensive when considering it sometimes takes 10 or more yards at $2.49/yd to complete one quilt. If the expense isn't enough, there is the time it takes to iron the tees, then iron the stabilizer onto the tees. And you can't just iron it on, you have to use a press cloth and spend about 10 seconds in small section - sometimes over a minute just moving it around, pressing, moving it, pressing - you get the picture. It takes a lot of time!

Here comes the solution with liquid starch. I was a bit skeptical at first as to whether starch would make the tees stiff enough to work with. But it does. So where to get the starch? Of course, you can always go out and buy Sta-Flo or some other bottled liquid starch from the store. But what fun would that be? We're cutting costs here. And time. With a bit of Googling I came across some really great recipes for homemade starch. Pinky Has a Brain is by far my favorite. With a little tweaking I found what I was happy with.

Her recipe calls for 1 T corn starch and 4 cups of water. However, I needed it just a little bit stiffer, so I double the starch. I also needed much more than 4 cups. One full size quilt with 30 tees takes about 48 cups of solution. To quadruple a batch I use 8 T corn starch and 16 cups of water. 15 of them boiling, the rest to mix with the starch.

I cut the tees, place them in the cooled starch solution one by one, squeeze out the starch and lay them flat to dry. I improvised a drying rack to accommodate a large amount of tees. It takes about 1 day for them to dry like this, but I can be finishing up one quilt while the new tees are drying, so it works out! I then take the tees, iron them flat, using a little extra steam if necessary, cut them to size, and voila! I have beautiful even squares that are easy to work with! It's best if you can get your tees to lay really flat so there isn't much ironing to do later on. I've also tried them in the dryer, but I didn't really like the results. They were still a little too stretchy for me.

 Here are two quilts I've completed using this method. I wish you could feel how soft they are. It's really just like snuggling up with your favorite tee shirt. I've been using cotton batting and usually use flannel for the backing to compliment the tees, unless cotton is requested.

This is actually a double-sided full size quilt made using the same process. The starch stabilizer allows for freedom in free motion quilting, makes the tees more stable and taut so there is no bunching, and in the end they wash up so beautifully.

DIY Drying Rack Tutorial

Reading up on t-shirt quilting techniques I realized that there were quite a few people that didn't want to use the interfacing on the backs of the tees, which prevents stretching and makes sewing easier. The tees do take a more rigid feel once backing is applied. Instead of using interfacing, these adventurous souls were using liquid starch. They are dipping the tees into the starch and allowing them to dry, or putting them in the dryer. I was a little skeptical about whether starch would give me the same rigidity required to produce a clean cut and accurate squares, since most of the posts I was reading were not from professional quilters, but those that had decided to try a t-shirt quilt. 

Well, it worked. I decided I didn't like the dryer method, but laying the tees flat to dry DID produce a nice, rigid surface that will wash out once all the quilting is done, creating a softer quilt. 

So where to dry out 20+ tees on a flat surface that would not cause damage to the surface? I needed to make a drying rack. I couldn't have the rack taking up floor space, as my once large crafting room is getting smaller and smaller. It would have to hang from the ceiling. And the surface would be so much better if it wasn't solid but made of a mesh to allow air flow. And big. Even cut to size 20 15" wide tees take up a lot of room! With my husband ingenuity, a little Googling, and a trip to the hardware store, this is what we came up with: 

 It's a little difficult to see the mesh, but it's there! If you'd like to make one too, here is what we used and what we did.

You will need:

24 cup hooks
6 drywall inserts
A drill
7 8' lengths of 3/4" PVC pipe
4 3/4" PVC t-connectors
8 3/4" PVC 90 degree elbows
2 boxes of prepackaged chandelier chain (or whatever you prefer as long as you can remove links for easier cutting)
Printed Duck Tape
1 Roll of Wildlife Netting (garden center at our store)

Ignore the tube of silicon. We didn't use it because we used duck tape instead. See directions.

To make:

We cut each of the tubes in half, them put the long sides back together using the T-Connectors. This allowed us to put a brace between each of the long side to stabilize the rack and prevent sagging once the wet tees were put on.

Tees and center supports

We connected the ends using the elbows and the other halves.

Ends and Elbows

My husband then drilled pilot holes in the top and bottom of each elbow and t-join on the top frame, offsetting the holes so that they weren't directly above or below each other, and on the tops of the bottom frame. We then put eye hooks into each of the pilot holes for the chains to hang from and from the ceiling. 

pilot holes

cup hooks

He measured and drilled holes in the ceiling for the remaining cup hooks (which should be six) and put in drywall inserts to prevent them from pulling free of the ceiling. 

It takes a bit of patience and two people, but we hung the racks from the ceiling and from each other using the chains. We measured the chains about 1' long. I wanted it to be adjustable and out of the way when I wasn't using it, so the chains help me to lower and raise it. This doesn't work very well, so I'm researching how to do it differently. However, the rack itself works great! 

hung up

Now for the fun part. This is where the netting and the duck tape come in. We stretched the netting between the sections across the width. To secure the netting, we cut it, then taped down one side with duck tape. We then stretched it taut and used smaller pieces to make sure it was evenly taut and flat. Then we taped it down by taping from the top down to the bottom and wrapping the netting onto the pipe. It worked wonderfully and nothing has come loose or pulled up. Besides, the zebra stripe tape adds a bit of flair and interest to the pipes! 

This would make a terrific clothes drying rack for a laundry room, even on a smaller scale!