The T-Shirt Destroyer

Every time I purge through my closet, I come across a shirt that, despite the fact I've maybe never worn it more than once, I decide to keep. I bet everybody has some of these shirts: the shirt you bought on a trip, a shirt you bought at a concert, and, of course, a shirt for every group and club you were ever a part of.

I have over 60 of these vacation/club/event t-shirts just hanging up in my closet. I don't wear them because they are too large and boxy. I do kind of care about my appearance in that I don't want to look like I'm a little kid wearing their parent's clothes for dress-up. You know what I mean?

It has definitely put a cramp in my simplifying style to keep all of these shirts, and yet I can't just let them go. So now I just have a bunch of shirts just waiting to be made useful again. 

Luckily, there is a wealth of DIY T-shirt project tutorials on the internet that teach you how to make your t-shirts usable and wearable again. One evening, I decided to give the DIY craze a shot. I chose one that seemed simple enough: cut down the sides in a curved pattern, make some fringes, tie the fringes down the side and viola! I've got myself a fitted t-shirt!

Not-so-luckily, I am apparently under the false impression that I am a crafty person.

Needless to say, how the shirt was supposed to turn out and my finished product did not match up:

I pretty much ended up with a mutilated t-shirt. It was completely unusable as an article of clothing by the time I was finished with it. My first mistake was probably attempting this at 3am in the morning. My next mistake was using scissors that do next to nothing in the cutting arena.

So, that T-shirt is now various rags that I use to wipe off dust on my furniture. At least it's sort of useful?

It's a good thing I used a "test" t-shirt this time around, so I didn't ruin any of my more "precious" t-shirts. However, I'm still stuck with my original problem combined with a new fear of these "easy" DIY projects.

Should I recruit someone with a sewing machine to make a quilt out of the t-shirts? Since t-shirt fabric is hard to work with, is it even worth the effort? Do I even care about these shirts anymore?

While I ponder what to do with these currently useless materialized forms of memories, I should probably figure out what, if anything, I should collect as token of remembrance instead of more t-shirts. My uncle collects shot glasses. A good friend of mine collects coffee mugs. My dad had a short stint of collecting fridge magnets. What do you collect?

~AM