I had accumulated a suitcase full of T-shirts that I was no longer
wearing but was unwilling to part with. What to do with these intimate
mementoes? Making a laprobe from them seemed the perfect solution. With
directions on how to proceed from one quilting friend, I “booked” two
days with another quilting friend, Dora King. Dora generously shared
her quilt-making tools and her stash of fabric, from which I picked the
white-on-brown polka-dotted fabric to frame the blocks. She also
contributed her stitching skill, both on her sewing machine and for the
hand-stitched finish on the binding. I was able to focus completely on
all the other aspects of quilt making, from laying out the design
through tying the final knots that hold the layers together.
The quilt blocks document my college days, church involvement, and
work-related activities. You can tell which one was my favorite
T-shirt, by looking for the most faded block! It reflects a seven-month
stay in Philadelphia for an off-campus semester and summer job in 1977.
Even the backing fabric holds memories – it’s the remnant from a
favorite flannel sheet.
Other notes:
Selecting a suitable framing fabric was tough because it needed to both contrast with and harmonize among so many different colors. The breakthrough came when I thought of the blocks as pictures to be framed, and chose a brown fabric with an unobtrusive but coordinating pattern.
Using the same size block for each T-shirt was impractical, both because the shirts ranged from a women’s small to a men’s extra-large and because the designs varied so widely in size. A block that was big enough to accommodate the largest design was too big for the smallest shirt. Artistically, too much space around a smaller design detracted from what that design had to offer. The resulting rhythm of uniform widths within a column, while varying column widths and block heights, makes a more dynamic design. The final arrangement reminds me of a Mondrian painting.
Finding the right location for each piece was both analytic and intuitive. While ideally each block should relate to the colors of its neighbors, it also needs to contrast adequately. Blocks with bright colors needed to alternate with more muted blocks. The varying heights of the blocks added another dimension to the challenge. I wanted to avoid blocks with their horizontal framing aligned, but needed to have each column the same final length. Finally, the placement of the columns evolved from putting the rainbow blocks in the middle and moving the asymmetric smaller designs to the outer edge.
|
Left column | Center Column | Right Column |
| L1 - "H" | C1 - TFM Eval and Tech Transfer Team | R1 - Albion College (yellow) | |
| L2 - Peachtree Software | C2 - Build Your Own Rainbow | R2 - RAF | |
| L3 - Animals | C3 - The Wave | R3 - SIAM, Wash U. | |
| L4 - Philadelphia | C4 - Building Rainbows | R4 - Wx | |
| L5 - CROP Walk | C5 - CRCT | R5 - ICWES | |
| L6 - MCP UMC ASP | R6 - Albion College (brown) |
1977 - R2 was from the volleyball team I was on during a summer job in Philadelphia. I don't remember anymore what the initials stood for, but it was NOT Royal Air Force! L4 also reflects that summer - it's my all-time favorite T-shirt.
1978 - R1 and R6 were purchased the week I graduated from Albion College. The campus bookstore was having a sale on school T-shirts.
1978-1979 - L1 was from the yet-to-be-named-for-a-donor, residence hall "H" in which I lived on the South 40 residential campus of Washington University in St. Louis.
1979-1980 - R3 was from the start-up of the student chapter of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) at Washington University. The equation is from certain matrix manipulations used to solve problems in Systems Control theory.
1980-1983 - L3 and R4 were from two softball teams of which I was a nominal member while working at Westinghouse Defense Electronics Center near Baltimore. On R4, the Circle-bar-W logo of Westinghouse combined with an "X" for "experimental" or "unknown," I think, though "Wx" is also incidentally a shorthand for "weather." The graphic for L3 was designed by a team member, though I no longer remember who.
1984 - R5 was from the 1984 International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists (ICWES) held in Washington, DC, that year. I helped out at and attended the conference sessions.
1985 on (church-related) - Some time in here, I participated in a CROP Walk to raise money for hunger relief and received L5. And at some point I helped sponsor a team from Mill Creek Parish (MCP) United Methodist Church (UMC), where I attend, that was going on an Appalachian Service Project (ASP) mission, receiving L6. While serving as treasurer at MCP, I used accounting software that I think resulted in receiving L2, from the company that produced that package. While building an addition to the church, C2 and C4 were sold as part of the fundraising campaigns, the rainbow being a prominent symbol in this church's windows. C3 was for those putting together the contemporary worship service known as "The Wave" - the cross in the logo was designed and built by one of the team members.
2000 on (work-related) - C1 and C5 are from my work at the MITRE Corporation's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD). C1 was from the Traffic Flow Management (TFM) Evaluation and Technology Transfer team. C5 was from the Collaborative Routing Coordination Tools (CRCT) team, developing tools that help decrease flight delays, hence the slogan "Because no one likes to sleep in an airport." The photo is of how air traffic control used to be done, manually moving markers called "shrimp boats" that indicate the position of airplanes. The yellow and blue triangular figure (lower left side of block) is CAASD's logo.
The laprobe is finished with backing fabric that was a remnant from
a favorite teal flannel sheet, tied with perle cotton matching the
chocolate brown of the framing fabric.