Excerpt from a forthcoming collection of essays

Checked That Off My List

 

I’ve reluctantly come to a sad conclusion about myself: I am never going to make a quilt out of discarded shoulder pads.

 

Recently, I came across a large bag of shoulder pads that I had saved over the years. They were saved because I couldn’t bear to let them go. My husband says he is going to carve that on my tombstone: She never met anything she could throw away.

 

But it’s possible the time has come to let the shoulder pads go.

 

There was a time when shoulder pads were a part of every woman’s wardrobe. (This was before you were born, Dear Reader.) The idea was to make a woman’s waist look tiny in contrast. Every blouse, every suit jacket, every shirtwaist dress had giant pillows sewn into the shoulders, making the fabric stand up three inches and extending horizontally far enough to give the wearer a four-foot wingspan. In the 1940s, shoulder pads rivaled the size of football pads. They were, in fact, produced by the same manufacturer and were virtually interchangeable. Four shoulder pads could, in a pinch, double as a futon. Laid end to end, they could be used as a speed bump on the street.

 

Over time, shoulder pads shrank, as the notion of women looking like linebackers faded from popularity. The fashion designers couldn’t simply drop shoulder pads from one season to the next, because women would look like they had been eating mushrooms with Alice in Wonderland. Big. Small. So every year, shoulder pads became smaller and thinner until, like the Cheshire Cat, nothing was left but the smiling shape.

 

By the 1970s, shoulder pads had shrunk to the size of potholders. And by the 1980s, they had just enough loft to make a woman look like she was hiding a brace for her broken collarbone.

 

My shoulders are already wide enough, so for years I removed the pads from any new dress, blouse or jacket that I bought. Sometimes the garment didn’t fit right after that, but oh well. The real issue was, what to do with the discarded pads? Here were these nice foam parabolas covered with a crayon box of bright fabrics. Surely they could be put to use somehow and not be tossed on the ash heap—where they would not rot and return, dust to dust, to the earth but would take up landfill space until the dinosaurs returned.

 

It seemed like such a waste, but I couldn’t think of an alternative.

 

I kept removing shoulder pads and sticking them in a drawer until they finally went totally out of fashion and stopped appearing in my clothes. By then I had a trash bag full. The bag had long outgrown the bottom drawer of my makeup chest and was crowding the box of shoes needing repair and the pile of old throw pillows next to the bag of stuffed animals in the closet. The pads remained in the closet, quiet and uncomplaining, patiently awaiting the day when I would be struck by the artsy-craftsy fairy and decide to convert them into a gaily-colored…something. 

 

There were many long dark years when the artsy-craftsy fairy directed me to make floral arrangements out of dried okra painted gold and serving trays lined with wine corks, while the 300 shoulder pads languished in the closet. But then inspiration struck! While walking through the Philadelphia airport in the 2000s, I saw a gorgeous wall hanging made by some community outreach group. On close inspection, it turned out the wall hanging was a quilt made out of—ta da!—shoulder pads!

 

There it was, the obvious, beautiful product that could be fashioned out of shoulder pads.

 

The flight home was joyous. I rushed to the closet and dragged the bag out into the light. Pouring the scarlet and gold and turquoise scraps onto the floor, I began to imagine them in a patterned array on the wall or across a bed. No more fat bag taking up room in the closet. I would have a quilt with a great story behind it.

 

All I had to do was buy a needle and thread and learn to quilt. 

 

Alas, it turns out there’s more to it than that. To start with, even though my great-grandmother sewed dozens of quilts by hand, today instructors want you to have a sewing machine. Not only that, you need a walking foot for your sewing machine. And a quilting guide bar. The list goes on: Quilting gloves. A tailor’s clapper.  And my favorite: Cluck cluck sew diagonal seam tape.

 

Putting aside the list of tools, one day I spread the shoulder pads out to experiment with patterns from the available colors. The designs in quilting books were inspirational. I tried wedding band circles and log cabin squares and sunbursts, but there weren’t quite enough pieces of the right colors to make a design. 

 

Here was another, bigger problem: I needed more shoulder pads. 

 

Over a drink that night, I poured out my dilemma to my husband. All these shoulder pads that I had saved for years, now I finally had a project but I didn’t know how to quilt and I didn’t have the right tools, and worst of all, I didn’t have enough pads, and where was I going to get more shoulder pads, now that they were out of fashion?

 

He took a sip and offered the sort of sage advice he has given me for forty years. “Throw them all away.”

 

I was speechless. I stared at him for a moment, picturing the scraps at the landfill. “Maybe the dinosaurs can use them when they return.”

 

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Copyright Robin Traywick Williams

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