Louisville Magazine

AUG 2016

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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30 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 8.16 A BIT CLOSER Patchy Memories By Jenny Kiefer Turning T-shirts into a padded piece of art. Justin Ennis' mother taught him how to do a stipple-stitch pattern — a meandering country road of thread — when he was in high school. Soon after, he started taking orders for T-shirt quilts, which he made with a long-arm quilting machine at home. Orders piled up. "After a while, it just got ridiculous," he says. "I felt bad because I was taking up my parents' house." In February, Ennis, now 26, opened Happy Dance Quilting in a shotgun on Baxter Avenue. (The base price for a wall hanging is $120, $320 for a quilt that will fit a king-size bed.) Wendy Davidson, band director at Hebron Middle School in Bullitt County, recently picked up a queen- size quilt. "Now that I teach, T-shirts are not my everyday wear anymore," she says. "I had a bunch of T-shirts sitting around collecting proverbial dust, and I wanted a way to keep them because they're a part of my past." Here's the backstory for a few of Davidson's tees. "I worked at Joe's Crab Shack as a hostess while in college, then as a retail manager there for five or six years. Thunder Over Louisville was our big event." "Sophomore year, all the places we performed. That shirt is special because that's the year I met my now-husband while in marching band. Now we have children." "One of the only non-red shirts I purchased throughout my tenure at U of L. The School of Music is where I spent the majority of my time as an undergrad and in graduate school. I didn't get out of the building very often." "The Gator Bowl was in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2006, a loss to Virginia Tech. Two days before the game, they put us on a bus and didn't tell us where we were going. We entered the back of the Magic Kingdom and were one of the bands that performed in the parade. Then we got to be at Disney World the rest of the day." "If you're a football fan, the 2007 Orange Bowl against Wake Forest is probably our football team's most prestigious bowl win. It was the nicest hotel we'd ever stayed in. We got chartered planes to Florida from Louisville, which had never happened before. The beach in Miami was really nice. Unfortunately, they determined each school's band needed to have the exact same number of people on the field, which sounds kind of nice until you realize Wake Forest's band tops out at 60 and U of L's marches at 200." Photo by Chris Witkze

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