Help - mosaic tee shirt quilt - need guidance!
 

Hiya All, I am a NEW quilter. I've started a mosaic Tshirt quilt of my parents Harley Davidson shirts. I wasn't able to find a pattern to follow for a mosaic tee shirt quilt. I asked around a few bloggers but they just said they piece it together and go from there [for the top layer]. So I went with that. So I've pieced together the shirts and have fabric to "fill in" the spaces where the shirts don't meet up.

Here's the problem...I didn't think about making the "open spaces" nice and even squares or rectangles...I was focusing on spreading out the shirts and making the open space relatively even throughout. Now I've sewn the shirts together...but I didn't leave a margin for the extra fabric to be sewn in. Meaning I sewed all the way to each end of the tee shirt square forgetting there was going to be another piece sewn in. I hope this makes sense...sigh...I am getting frustrated. Short of ripping [seam ripper] all the shirts apart...and starting over...I just don't know what to do. I've been standing here staring at the layout [on the floor] for the last hour.

Anyone have advice????? THANK YOU.

could you show us pictures? i'm confused as to what you did-vs want to do---do you mean you've created a quilt top without extra spaces? if that is the case- and you want to add between the squares you have sewn together you really have no choice except to (un-sew) and add what you want to where you want.
if you really don't want to take apart what is together but you want to make it larger you could add borders...but pictures may show us some other alternatives

Was there enough of a margin from the picture of the shirts and the seams to where instead and ripping and stretching the shirts more you can just cut the sewn edges off and re-sew them together??

I have open spaces. But when I sewed the surrounding shirts together, I sewed straight to the edge of the shirt not leaving an allowance for the fill fabric. I am working with a 1/2" allowance. Let me take some pics...

Pics...the up close pics are showing how the edge of a square is sewn completely to the edge. I think the answer to "fix" this is right in front of me but I don't know what to do. LOL.

Side note...I am going to school for nursing, completely my coursework right now...and I'm a straight A student...however with this project...I'm not sure what has happened to my brain...LOL.

No, I kept the margin close to the picture since I had SO many shirts to work with and they were all good shirts. So I left the the margin an inch off the picture with a 1/2" allowance. Maybe next time, I'll leave a bit of a larger margin for future mistakes...

here is the whole thing. here is the whole thing. the bull on bottom left is not sewn and I just right sided it up. The peach square to YOUR right is floating. And the two squares above the blue eagle square to YOUR left of the brown eagle are also floating; floating just meaning I haven't put them in anywhere yet.

The only way I can figure out how to do this would be to put it on a piece of fabric the size of your finished quilt and satin stitch around all your pieces. Do they have any stabilizer on them? I hope someone can come up with a better idea as that would be alot of work.
Good luck with this, it will look awesome when its done

What is satin stitch? Yes, I used pellow 911FF fusible interfacing on the shirts.

You might unsew each group of shirts or section just enough to add fabric to make it square. Once all are square, figure out the largest one, then add another border to the others to get them to the same size. Great shirts! Looking forward to the finished project.