Domestic Policy: Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Now what?

Can we agree that there are too many commemorative T-shirts in the world? My theater group is a purveyor of T-shirts — “Dad,” my daughter said, “you gotta sell merch!” — but I recognize that a lot of people have had their fill of T-shirts and have declared an indefinite moratorium on buying them. Many end up in rag piles or thrift shops. You could probably fill a landfill with useless T-shirts collected from the people of Baltimore. (In fact, we should not throw them away; Baltimore and all the surrounding counties collect clothing, including Ts, for recycling into useful products.)

Another solution: T-shirts that have sentimental value — from an event, vacation, sports camp, class trip, reunion or concert you’d like to remember — can be cut and stitched into a “memory quilt.” I’ve seen this done by a crafty grandmother for her granddaughters as high school graduation gifts. Rather than discarding all the T-shirts her granddaughters collected but no longer wore, she cut them into rectangles and squares and patched them together into a colorful quilt that can spread across a bed or be packed away as a keepsake.

My son and daughter had piles of T-shirts and sport jerseys from ice hockey and lacrosse and from school plays. They were no longer being worn and taking up three full bins. I got their permission to quilt their T-shirts and jerseys — the ones they did not care to keep whole — then contacted Peggy Buzzard, a specialist in memory quilts who sews in her rowhouse in Colgate, on the east side of Baltimore County. (She made all the quilts in photographs with this post.) The results were quite pleasing. I don’t know if my son and daughter will actually use the quilts, but they now have patches of memories stitched together to form a colorful picture of their days in school and sports.