Dad's Beer T-Shirt Quilts

Aunt Mary's Quilt

My mother taught me how to sew when I was a small child. Like Dad taking me fishing as soon as I could hold a fishing pole, Mom had us sewing with her as soon as we could safely maneuver a needle. I’ll never be the seamstress my mother was, blind stitch as well, make so few mistakes, create such wondrous miracles of playful creativity, or ever be able to simply look at an article of clothing and recreate the pattern out of thin air, but all the same it is a skill that has brought me much joy and practical application my whole life and I am forever thankful. There are a lot of tributes I have done for my parents over the years, obviously Mom having more opportunities since she has been gone longer. Now that Dad is gone and I am still working through and coming to terms with his loss many of my tributes incorporate them both…which in many ways makes sense….they both created me after all.

Rhea's Quilt

One of the first trips to Eastern Oregon to go through Dads things we came across his clothes that had been packed up after he died, some possibly never unpacked from his move to Huntington a couple years before. Dad was never into clothes, always wearing jeans and t-shirts for the most part. None of us had any problem letting go of the jeans and other odds and ends but it was his t-shirts we all paused over, all collectively unable to part with them but all questioning what the hell we were going to do with them.

Dad had some plain t-shirts, which those were easy to give away, but what we all hard stopped on were his beer t-shirts. Anyone who knew Dad knows he loved microbreweries and even worked on and off for the McMenimin Brothers breweries over the years, building brew kettles for them and other stainless steel pieces in their bars. Whenever he traveled he also bought t-shirts from breweries he visited and enjoyed their beer. By the time he died he had amassed a huge collection of beer t-shirts, of course the McMenimins Brothers bars were the stars, with many repeats of their t-shirts like the High Street Café logo and the ruby ale logo.

We all talked about taking a shirt or two each, possibly of giving them away to friends, but many were literally threadbare and we knew they would end up being nothing more than a memento stuck in a drawer. I so wished for them to still breath life, to continue on some how. These shirts had been Dad, so represented him, with all immediately nostalgic for him when seeing them. It was Aunt Mary that I first said that I might make quilts out of them. She perked right up and said she liked that idea, and after I talked to my sisters and cousin, it was decided: I would make beer t-shirt quilts for us all.

Krista's Quilt (that lives on her bed)

It would be more than a year and a half later that I would start on them. I finally brought most of the shirts down to LA last summer and it was not till after Thanksgiving when I knew I’d be with both Rhea and Krista for Christmas that I started on the first two quilts. Four have been made so far, Rhea’s first, then Krista, then Aunt Mary’s and finally Martha. I have promised to make one for Josslyn, with some of the less beer-y shirts, and then of course, one for myself and possibly others if I can get more creative with the remaining shirts.

Although I didn’t know it when I started, I soon realized how emotional making these quilts would be. I hummed and hawed on each, each shirt carefully selected to both match the fabric I had painstakenly picked specially for each person as well as go along with each other. I had to take a full week break from initially starting Rhea’s because cutting the shirts into the squares they needed to be seemed almost sacrilegious and after only cutting one or two I had to take time to meditate and reason out the process. Cutting the shirts never got easy, but giving them new life in the squares they became moved me on to the next.

Martha's Quilt

I found once I started a new quilt a feverish urgency came over me and it was all I could think of. I would spend an entire weekend finishing one so I could see it whole and complete. I would lay it out on my bed and stroke it flat, take pictures of it, laugh when my cats would spring up on it to christen it, fret over the flaws, or admire the triumphs, and then I would cry. Both a good and sad cry, seeing how much of myself went into these quilts, and how I had sewn my father into fabric trying to capture memories of him with the family member the quilt would soon belong to, using the skills my other lost parent had long ago taught me. I would sit and cry and hope that it would be obvious that my heart was sewn along those squares, and while I doubted if that was clear enough, I was absolutely sure Dad would have been proud of them, would have been thrilled that those silly shirts that he loved so much were not just tossed in the garbage, but preserved by us, remade into something else but still very much cherished.