Best solutions to keep T-shirts as memorabilia?

December 17, 2023 9:33 PM

I've made a habit of collecting T-shirts as keepsakes, but time has made some of them too small on me, and others are showing their artwork fraying a little too much from use. I feel like getting them in frames to be hung on walls is the best solution to the problem, and frames do exist for that, but they vary widely in price and required setup.

So my question for MetaFilter is -- what have you done to preserve T-shirts that remind you of important memories? Did you frame them, and if so how, and are you satisfied with the money you spent and the results you got? If you found some other way to do it, I'd like to know about that too. Thanks!

posted by The Pluto Gangsta to Home & Garden (4 answers total)

I've had a bunch of keepsake t-shirts turned into a quilt! It's a great way to display them and still have them be usable while sparing a lot of wear and tear.
posted by TwoStride at 9:45 PM on December 17, 2023 [13 favorites]

Make them into pillows. Also make them into soundproofing tiles for your listening or hobby room.
posted by limeonaire at 2:07 AM on December 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

I feel like there's a question you need to ask yourself to start with: do you want to keep these t-shirts as t-shirts, or are you fine changing what they are? The former will mean you're looking for display solutions, the latter for craft solutions.

If you don't care, and you have a lot of t-shirts, and you don't have cats or dogs that sleep on your bed, I would go for the quilt solution. (Pillows are lovely but there is such a thing as having too many pillows, sadly.)

For frames, I would look into inexpensive shadowbox-type frames - those have some depth to them and you'll be able to fold the entire t-shirt within the frame while leaving the design on the front visible. Measure the largest design you want to display and just buy a whole bunch of identical square shadowbox frames (example). They're not going to look like t-shirts but it'll look a lot more coherent once it's up on your walls, and also take up less space than framing each t-shirt flat.
posted by sailoreagle at 5:43 AM on December 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Or even more basic, cut out a 10” x 10” square* of tshirt with the motif centered and put it in an ordinary 10” square frame (*or whatever size works best). Wrap the material around a piece of stiff cardboard and tape/paste it down. You can look into more archival methods, but essentially this.

You could photograph them, gang them together in a photo-editing program, write a small blurb about each image, print out the whole thing as a large format poster and frame that.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 5:36 AM on December 19, 2023