Why the interface was originally used to make T-shirt quilts

This has to do with the timing of early T-shirt quilts. During the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, we, as a society, began acquiring an excessive number of T-shirts. The price of T-shirts and silk screening were decreasing while the number of events where T-shirts were given out increased. T-shirts just became what to wear. We were just wearing blue jeans and T-shirts. During this same time period, quilt making experienced a resurgence. When crafters began picking up quilt making, many began with a project called a sampler quilt. As the name indicates, quilters would make sample blocks from many different quilting block patterns. 

These sample blocks were then put together into a quilt in rows and columns separated by sashing.Sashing is the material used to separate the rows and columns. Sashing can be very narrow – for example just one inch wide, or very wide  for example three or four inches wide. In some quilts traditional quilts, the sashing could be as intricate as the blocks were.When a quilter was given a pile of T-shirts to make into a quilt, this sampler method of making a quilt was foremost in their minds. So, quilters cut the T-shirts and made the quilt in the sampler method.Thus, the convergence of quilt making and T-shirts resulted in traditional style T-shirt quilts. A traditional style T-shirt quilt is characterized by uniform size blocks lined up in rows and columns separated with sashing.

 Early on, quilters ran into a issue  they were unable to easily sew T-shirt material to the traditional cotton quilting fabric they were using for the sashing. When they tried sewing a stretchy piece of T-shirt material to non-stretchy cotton, the T-shirt material stretched during the sewing process and ended up longer than the cotton.The sewing machine technology at that time and experience working with T-shirt material was just not there.

The solution was to use iron-on interfacing to stiffen and keep T-shirt material from stretching out of shape. It worked and it became the solution quilters used and an industry standard. If I had just been able to Google “how to make a T-shirt quilt”, I would have made that first T-shirt quilt just like everyone else was making them.This solution worked because I had developed a new way to make a T-shirt quilt that did not use cotton sashing. And without cotton sashing, I was just sewing T-shirt material to T-shirt material.