The Pattern Continues...

Remember way back in July when I kept putting off the start of the t-shirt quilt?

I'm doing it again.

I think we can all agree that quilt was a success.  Now it comes to my next project and again I am stalling.  My excuse this time around is about pattern.  I'm completely lost as to how I want this next project to go.

Despite Emily's generous gift of a super-secret-quilted-baby-something (which she is crazy generous for making) I have been planning a cot quilt for awhile now.  I mean you can't have too many, right?  From what I hear everything baby related gets covered in puke and poo on the regular so having a couple quilts isn't a bad thing.

I have the materials picked out, again stuff laying around the house, but I am still in the process of tracking them down.  The last quilt was all about me.  It was made of my t-shirts and reflected my personal history up to a particular point.  That point being getting married.  Pete is only tangentially present in that quilt.  He is a much bigger part of this picture.

This quilt will be made from his clothes.  Unlike me, Pete keeps all his old clothes.  (I know I kept all those t-shirts, but i am horrible for donated buckets of stuff hastily and then mourning the loss of a particular item the next time the season comes around.) There are items in that wardrobe that have not seen the light of day since before we moved in together over six years ago. Items that were sent from his closet in New Zealand but speak of a much different boy than the man I know.

I'm not touching those items.  They are his to do with as he pleases.  I am going for his old work shirts and boxers.  A kinky combination on the surface but one that has precedent.  Back in my Kentucky days, before I met Pete, I had a colleague doing her PhD on a group of quilters in the Appalachian mountains.  Their stories were fantastic, as most old mountain ladies'stories are, but there was one that caught my attention then that I have held with me since.  It goes without saying that they reused fabric.  Rarely was any new material bought to complete their projects but some of their materials were not only reused, but hot.

It seems that many of the ladies worked in the Jockey factory sewing together briefs and boxers.  Occasionally a few of the larger scraps would accidentally appear in their handbags when they got home at the end of the day.  Beautiful deep blues and rich reds so rare in their usual threadbare offerings of old clothes and husbands' work shirts.  These pieces would then find their way into the quilts of the quilting bee and they would giggle about the story as they related it to my colleague years later.

Maybe it gave them a little thrill to steal these scraps, like children taking candy out of the pick n mix boxes, and 'hide' them in their traditional, and acceptable, hobby.  Maybe they just saw fabric as fabric and couldn't abide the waste of throwing away perfectly good scraps.  Maybe both.  Maybe neither.

Fabric is fabric.  Waste not, want not.


While I track down these old clothes of my dear husband I am also thinking about the pattern.  I don't want to do the free-form improvisation of the t-shirt quilt and in reference to this tradition of using the 'menfolks' clothes as material I'm leaning toward a more traditional pattern but I'm not sold on stars or rings or any of the traditional blocks.

A quilt with a traditional technique but a more modern look.  That would fit my husband to a tee.