Thursday, June 30, 2011

I will be able to get things done

I have, for the rest of the summer, 4 hours a week to myself.  I've hired my friend's daughter/Ryan's friend to come watch the boys every Thursday so that I can get stuff done. I am simply giddy with the freedom. I have projects and now I can actually do them, all for the same price Tom pays to whack balls into trees on the golf course.
I want to make this quilt.  I want to make it and sleep under it and drink tea out of a chipped mug under it amidst a sea of crumpled tissues when I am sick. I am therefor on a hunt for fabric with which to make it.  This hunt takes time, so until I find all of the fabric I need (anyone have old sheets for me?) I am making Ryan a t shirt quilt out of all of her old rec league shirts and kiddie marathon shirts, stuff like that.  Today I worked on that quilt and can already tell you that it has the potential to be awesome.  Unfortunately I have the potential to fuck it up, so we'll see how it turns out.  The thing about t shirts is that they are made out of very soft, very stretchy material.  This doesn't work well for a quilt because the fabric puckers up and sags and after a few washings the front of the quilt is bigger than the back and it all hangs wrong.  So you have to buy interfacing to make the t shirt fabric act like quilting fabric. (Interfacing is the stuff they use to make collars and cuffs stuff in dress shirts.)  So today I spent almost my whole 4 hours cutting out interfacing and fusing it to my shirt-fronts (it irons on like a patch) and now I have 23 squares of non-stretchy t shirt logos all ready to sew together into one big quilt of childhood memories.  Unfortunately 23 is not a number conducive to even rows.  So I need either one or two more shirts.  I may go steal shirts that still fit but that she never wears, or I may have to go replace lost shirts from her past.  When she was in elementary school the kids wore their school pride shirts every Friday.  Tom sold that shirt for a quarter at a yard sale and now no one on facebook has one to give me as replacement. :(  But, Ryan has souvenir shirts from vacations, including one she left out in the yard for a week to be leached out by sun and rain. I may steal that one for the quilt.  But still,  I'd like to find a school pride Friday shirt.  I'm almost desperate enough to go pay the full $10 for a new one, but it seems like a colossal waste of money for something I'm just going to cut the front out of.
I will post pics here when I get the quilt done.  I have no idea what Ryan will want to do with a quilt made from old Girl Scout camp shirts, but she will have it nonetheless.  And hopefully she will continue to amass souvenir t shirts and I can continue to add them to the quilt and eventually she will have a giant useless quilt made of ratty old clothes. And who wouldn't want that?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That sounds awesome! I can't wait to see pictures.