Compromise

Imagine my horror the day I found a huge pile of rotting t-shirts in the back of Brent's closet. Not hip, vintage, concert-type t-shirts, but discolored, high school, concert choir-type t-shirts. Any sane person (or third world country for that matter) would have thrown them out long ago. I tidily folded them and when Brent came home from work I encouraged him to think about throwing them out. He would never wear them again, we couldn't give them away or we'd have to pay for the accompanying tetanus shot, and they were just taking up space.

However, as I made my plea I could see the look on his face... THAT look. The sweet, sentimental look that quickly told me this pile of garbage meant something to him. His blue eyes cast about as if his dog just died and his lips turned down oh so slightly. Really, it was completely pathetic. So I thought about it and thought about it. Finally I came up with a compromise: I could make a t-shirt quilt that would memorialize these memories for him.

I hate t-shirt quilts. I think I've only seen one that I actually liked. Most of them look like a bunch of sweat-stained t-shirts sewn together which is about as artistic as a chia pet. As I got into it, I found that I actually like hacking into the old shirts. A trip to the fabric store to choose a border proved men really don't care about that kind of stuff, even if it's FOR them. Brent pretty much walked up to the first fabric he saw and told me it was what he wanted. He didn't even look around! He didn't even pet the bolt of fabric! It completely threw me off and I've never been in and out of Fabric Corner so quickly. I entrusted my favorite quilter to make the whole thing look better than I ever could while giving it a masculine tone. With a snow day today, I decided to put on the binding, snip the threads on the back and finish the sucker.

All in all I'm happy with it, Brent's closet is a bit cleaner but even better, he's relieved it's been spared from the garbage. The things we do for the ones we love!