T and Sympathy

I have a few old T-shirts in my closet. They hang there, proverbial skeletons, so boring that I can’t imagine ever removing one from its hanger and actually putting it on. But I don’t throw them away, either. And my eleven-year-old daughter has drawers full of oversized camp T-shirts and freebies, plus a few XLs her father gave her, all of which she rarely wears but won’t throw away, either.

Megan Nicolay had a similar stash when she was a tween — except that she, with a little prodding from her parents, figured out something to do with all those baggy shirts. Nicolay remembers well the first T-shirt she re-fashioned: “It was a white Hanes undershirt of my dad’s. I batiked a peace sign on it — that was in my hippie days — and dyed it a raspberry color.”

And that was just the beginning, before she and her sisters ever took a pair of scissors to a tee. Since then, though, she’s gone on to write two books for fashion-design do-it-yourselfers. The sky’s the limit, says Nicolay, who’s now riding a popular trend to the end of the rainbow. “Ultimately, once you think of the T-shirt as merely being a piece of fabric, you can make anything out of it,” she notes. “It’s a blank canvas.”

She’ll be in Denver at the Tattered Cover on Colfax tonight to sign her latest book, Generation T: Beyond Fashion, which goes beyond the basic wardrobe-oriented, closet-revamping recipes of the first tomes to incorporate new uses for T-shirts, including accessories for the home, car and your pet. There’s even a chapter dedicatd to guys.

Join Nicolay at her free tee party at 7:30 p.m. at 2526 East Colfax Avenue; go to www.tatteredcover.com or call 303-322-7727 for more information.
Wed., July 1, 7:30 p.m., 2009