Over Labor Day weekend, I made a 25th wedding anniversary quilt consisting of one car show T-shirt for each year of marriage. It’s the third one I’ve made in all the years we’ve known each other. The first was the Christmas after we were engaged and I “broke into” my fiancé’s house and took 20 random T-shirts. I also used blue jeans for the border fabric he had stashed in laundry baskets in his closet claiming they “shrunk”. He never missed any of those clothes until I presented him with the quilt.

The next quilt I made was in 2008, another Christmas surprise. It was made of T-shirts spanning 20 years of his car club’s show in Westport. I used fabric with flames on it to border the shirts, which was much easier to stitch together. Here it is, a mere 9 years later and I attempted a much larger quilt than I had before. A couple years ago for Christmas I changed the course of our destiny when after years of blanket wars with a queen/full size comforter on our queen-sized bed, I thought to buy a king-sized one. Its presence in our home has made the last two summers in the RV nothing but a tussle for control of the last quilt I made. Marking 25 years would make a bigger quilt.

This quilt wasn’t a surprise, as I needed my husband to help me decide which shirts to choose for each year. I only needed two more years to complete the quilt: last year’s, because my husband wouldn’t let me cut up the perfectly wearable 2016 T-shirts he already owned, and this year because at the time I started gathering the shirts, cars shows hadn’t yet happened.

Then there was logic to be reckoned with: we searched high and low for a shirt from the year we were married. Just when we were about to buy a shirt off the back of one of the rod run participants, I realized the year we were married isn’t actually included in those 25 years. The year following the wedding date is one year of marriage completed. It was the whole, “did the 21st century start at the year 2000 or 2001?”, conundrum all over again.

Then math was involved as I calculated how much fabric I needed for the borders around the shirts. It was a struggle, as I wondered how I ever managed to have solid strips of border fabric down the length of the last quilt. I tried to do the math out loud, thinking the cutter lady would offer some advice. Finally, when it was obvious she didn’t want to commit to my poor math skills and I would have to make the final call myself, I boldly went where woman have gone before and commanded the lady to cut.

When my husband and I were at Red Robin later that evening, geometry swirled through my head as I pondered where in that 2 ½ yards of fabric the short sections bordering the tops and bottoms of the shirts would come from. Napkins, graphs, and my phone calculator were involved. By the time dinner was over, I determined I would need another three yards. Because I wanted to start on the quilt the next day, we went back to the fabric store.

I am proud to say the quilt is done. The side borders are uneven, the shirts don’t line up, but I put 25 shirts and six yards of fabric together and made a blanket. We took it for a test spin last weekend at another car show and it works quite well. Our tug-of-war has ended for good, and perhaps we’ll get another 25 years because of it.

Gretchen Leigh is a stay-at-home mom who lives in Covington. You can read more of her writing and her blog on her website livingwithgleigh.com or on Facebook at “Living with Gleigh by Gretchen Leigh,” or twitter @livewithgleigh. Her column is available every week at maplevalleyreporter.com under the Life section.