“GRATEFUL”
I’ve tried a few times to make a bag using a t-shirt. A great way to give a t-shirt that no longer fits you a chance at new life. We all have a t-shirt that we love that either shrunk down or has stains, or holes, or a crazy worn out neck collar. When I was doing my clean up I found a vintage Grateful Dead t-shirt. I know a few of their songs but it was mainly the graphic that caught my eye and I know they have one of the most loyal fanbases in all of music. I used to have a manager that considered himself a “DeadHead” and he would tell me constantly about the Grateful Dead concerts he’s attended over the years.
The t-shirt bags I’ve created in the past would simply be something that I would view as okay to my standards today. Even with the clear vinyl inside the bag, the bags still felt light and were very difficult to sew because of their weight and tendency to stretch. But when something is hard or doesn’t work as intended I store it in my mental rolodex as a challenge to come back to later. It wasn’t until project “DEAD STOCK” that I would come up with an idea to make a t-shirt bag. For the second installment of this project my focus was just that. This bag is easily one of the upcycle projects I’m most proud of. Not only because I love the way that it looks but also because I found a formula that works to turn an old t-shirt into a bag that’s worth it’s salt.
A fun fact about this project is that while I was making it I watched the SAW movie series. Over the course of this project I had watched all ten movies in this series. I initially intended to only watch the first one. The SAW movies are also important for me because when I was younger my mother and I would go every year to see them. We went four years in a row to see SAW 2,SAW 3, SAW 4 and SAW 5. After SAW 5 we joked about how they will find a way to work in a twist. When SAW 6 came around we decided that the run of movies had ended. It wasn’t until over a decade later I would beg for this nostalgia again. And even though the later movies in the series don’t compare to the first two I was wildly entertained the entire time.