I have a bit of a t-shirt problem. I love the graphics. I like how someone at the gym will say, “Hey, I was at that concert, too! Wasn’t it great?” I love wearing something that represents my neighborhood when I’m traveling far away. I love how, every time I take a t-shirt out of the drawer, I remember the event or place where I got it, and how that place made me feel.
T-shirts have their limits, as external memory devices. They wear out. And, no matter how many times I tell myself I have enough t-shirts, they pile up. A reasonable thing to do would be to give them away. And I do, sometimes. But what if I forgot the thing forever? Anyway, nobody wants my old t-shirts.
So I chose shirts that I loved, but didn’t want to wear anymore, and I cut a big square from each one. My mom probably helped; she’s made several quilts. With a sewing machine, I assembled the 49 blocks in rows and columns. Then the sandwich: the sewed-together t-shirts, a layer of fluffy batting, and a piece of backing material. I pulled the whole stack loosely together with long lines of big stitches.
Then I quilted. And quilted. And quilted.
While I outlined the designs in the t-shirts with the needle, I remembered when I went to Wildlife Camp and hiked and learned about edible plants. I remembered the very first rock concert I went to and my college radio show. I remembered drawing my college biology department’s iguana and I remembered all the professors who signed my departmental t-shirt, with my drawing printed on the front. The point of quilting is to hold the layers together so they don’t shift around when you use the quilt. To do that, you have to put in a lot of stitches. I probably put in somewhere between 300 and 500 feet of stitches.
That took a long time. Maybe months? I haven’t done the documentary research (that’s what I call “reading old journals”) to figure it out. After all that, I had a lovely quilt and very raggedy edges. I had no idea how to sew on a binding. And then I learned how to knit. The quilt went onto that high shelf and there it stayed, through the years of yarn accumulation.
That’s where a lot of craft stories end. I’ve mostly stopped knitting now, and there are probably a dozen unfinished knitting projects hiding around my apartment in their project bags. The longer a project sits around, unfinished, the more daunting it seems.
But, a few weeks ago, in a fit of rare confidence, I got out the stepladder and took down the not-quite-finished, slightly-musty-smelling quilt.
From strangers’ blog posts I learned how to sew on a binding, and figured out that a problem I had could be solved with a new attachment for the sewing machine. My geometry skills helped with the binding, too. There’s a lot of math in the fiber arts. In a few evenings of sitting at the machine, the binding was finished. I added a little more quilting and a few newer things, like a pretty patch that my mom gave me this year, and the front of a more recent t-shirt.
I feel bad all those abandoned projects. It makes me feel like I’m a quitter. But now I have at least one piece of soft, tangible evidence that I’m not. When I sit on the couch with that evidence, I get to remember all those things again.
Photos: Helen Fields. See the finished t-shirt quilt.