Scrapbooking With Striped Paper: Shirt City

You know how it is: sometimes an idea for a project comes and you can't wait to get started and you blitz through and when it's finished you feel great. Other times, you know you want to make it, but it goes on the back burner and you know - just know - you'll come back to it later? How does - mmm, at least ten years later sound?

It's easily that: ten years since I spotted the little hand drawn illustration in a magazine and tore it out and kept it. No instructions, just the drawing, and a description of a quilt, sewn with care from a collection of blue and white striped shirts. It was a lovely thing: even in pen and ink it looked soft, but crisp, slightly faded, but also fresh. And it jumped right off the page at me because I too had a stash of blue and white striped shirts. Or, at least, some of them were striped, all of them were blue.

That's the way it is when you marry an accountant. You get used to him leaving the house dressed like Mr Banks. Sharp suit, nice shirt. Those shirts wear out and they get replaced, but they are never thrown away. Not in this house. All that beautiful blue poplin? It's a  bit tired, yes, after all that heavy accounting, but it's down, not out.

Funny how it's always blue. That's what he likes - narrow stripes, broader ones, tiny checks, plains: darker in the winter, lighter in the later months of the year, little white buttons, single cuff, double cuffed, and I save them all. Would you believe I have almost a drawerful? The picture on my torn out page shows big-ish quilt blocks, with a border of points cut from collars. I've spent years thinking about how to do it and I've been tempted to stray from my original plan by this book The Shirt Off His Back, which I'm probably going to give in and buy any day now. In the meantime? I can spare one cuff for my Get It Scrapped page, made for an article on setting the mood with stripes. 

“A pale blue striped patterned paper with low contrast and regularly spaced stripes does double duty on this page. I think it’s a pretty obvious signpost to the subject of the page, but it also conveys a mood: a sense of the calming, relaxing effect of stitching a quilt. If I had wanted to play up a “Business” mood to make a page more about working in the city and less about sewing with the shirts, I would have chosen a deeper toned, more striking, stripe. I prefer this restful look!”