My Crazy has a uniform

Dear Donk,

I got something totally amusing in the mail yesterday, which I think you'll appreciate in its irony, but we'll go into that another time. For today, let's look at my amusing scarf.

Amusing in the sense that it's basically ugly and it's basically totally unnecessary because I have a hundred scarves and despite these basic things, I still love it because of its weirdness. And its reuse of some favorite shirts that are so soft but so ill-fitting that I never wore them.

Shall I tell you more?

Sure, why not.

So, when I chose this project for this month's challenge, it felt like a no-brainer. Because it was a Tshirt reuse project which I automatically love and because it was not a holiday type project which I would automatically hate.

You know how I get with the holidays - it's a too much too soon thing and I always feel like I'm being bullied into the holiday spirit so I put off getting all into anything holiday-y until, like, later on when I feel like it's time. Or when Christmas is UPON US in the literal sense because it's suddenly December 25th. Then there are years like this one where Hanukkah starts way early and ends up dragging holidayness all through the month of December like a traffic cone stuck under the car and by the time I get to New Year's, The Holidays are worn down to a nub and are all covered in road debris.

And now that you know my detailed opinion on preemptive holiday celebrating, let's look at this scarf-beast.

Let's just ignore how pale and repulsive I look and the fact that my sweatshirt is dirty.

When I finally set out to piece this thing together, I had to have a serious coming to Jesus with my Tshirt drawer. Because, while I don't wear a lot of these shirts very often or ever, I had a hard time picturing myself cutting right into them.

Which makes no sense because wouldn't I get to enjoy them if they were cut out and featured on a scarf? Yes.

So, I make no sense.

Thankfully, I talked myself through it to the point where I choose my softest shirts, which I always wish I *could* wear because of their softness but never *do* wear because of the way they fit me like a big paper sack.

Those I felt OK cutting into. They were going to be swaddling my neck and that would be better than they way they swaddled my midsection when I had the gall to wear them which was never.

Then, when I'd stacked up a nice big pile of shirts, I realized an enormous error in my compiling methods - not consulting with Bubba first.

See, friends, Bubba is a Tshirt man. He has many Tshirts, he wears at least one a day (let's not go into specifics, you'll be happier this way. Promise.) and is something along the lines of a Platinum Diamond Super Special member of the Threadless community - if there is such a thing.

He is also a very good Tshirt selecter, which I know from first-hand experience because he gave me a lot of my favorite Tshirts which I refuse to cut into because of sentimental reasons and because I want to wear them to work on days when my director isn't in the office.

Some may reflect badly on future reviews, is why.

Anyway.

What I'd forgotten, in my haste to select shirts for this Soon To Be Coveted Scarf, was that Bubba was, like, the ultimate collector of awesome shirts worthy of showcasing and also The Great Destroyer of Tshirts and routinely tossed old wrecked shirts into the rag bin in the garage to make way for new awesome shirts worthy of showcasing.

Basically, I realized there was a bin of fab Bubba Tshirts in the garage with fab keepable prints on them that I could totally pillage.

OH.

Out to the garage I went.

And in this pile of shirts I found ET phoning home from a payphone booth (awesome), a list of grievances about the state of today's technology (where IS my jetpack, anyway?), and an X-ray of a dog who'd eaten some delicious homework.

That would do!

Didn't YOU think we'd have jetpacks by now? Yeah, me too.

Then I picked out my favorite soft shirts - the one with the green logo on it and the Mermaid race shirt - and another race shirt that I'd never wear again due to its paper-sack-fittingness from Rock 'N Roll San Jose '08 and my favorite Kauai shirt that had shrunk into a total belly shirt after a roll in the new machine set to HOT/HOT.

The fact that my shirts clash horribly with his shirts makes no difference to me.

I cut them all up, sewed them all together, enjoyed the fabulous coincidence that the super-softest white shirt with the green image on it managed to land square in the center so that when I wrapped it around my neck it looked like I meant to do that, and then basked in the glory of piecing together the reverse side from the remnants of the softest shirts so that I could reverse the scarf or wear it normal but always have the super-softness right there - swaddling my cold neck.

Yay?

Yes, yay.

And now I am the freakiest dog walker in town. Because that's the only time I've worn this scarf so far - was to walk the dog - and I wore it with the sweatshirt in the photo, black sweats, a Steamboat beanie and red mittens.

To say that I look like a lunatic when I walk the dog is an extreme understatement, but at least I'm warm. And crazy!

So, yeah, I made the scarf and it took a lot out of me. More so that it probably would have if I'd just broken down and chosen a holiday-themed project.

What do you want? I'm horribly stubborn. Which you know.

So? How are things going with YOUR projects?

xo

Finny