Quilted Memories

“Goucher loves giving us shirts,” says junior Eden Rovner (he/they). “And, with all the love in my heart, I’m not going to wear them after I leave Goucher.” Still, Rovner wanted to keep the shirts and find a use for them, so he decided to make a quilt.

Rovner has been embroidering, cross stitching, and sewing things for many years, but this will be their first quilt. They’ve been cutting out the graphics from the shirts and putting each one’s measurements into the platform Canva to design the blanket’s layout. Eventually, he will piece all the blocks together and attach them to a middle layer, called the batting, then add a bottom layer, the backing, to that. But Rovner keeps getting new shirts, so there is still more work to do. “It’s a fun way to use things,” he says, “and I have a good time.”

The variety of shirts shows the variety of Rovner’s college experience—they have a shirt of Godzilla fighting King Kong that they got at an American Red Cross blood drive on campus, one from Kent Devereaux’s presidential inauguration, and one with a vinyl record on it from Get Into Goucher Day 2023. They were also given a stash of vintage shirts from the Alumnae/i House, where they work in addition to being a tutor in the Writing Center.

Some shirts reflect Rovner’s time outside of the classroom over the last few years. He has two T-shirts from volunteering for the successful 2024 congressional campaigns of U.S. Rep John Olszewski Jr. ’04 and U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks. He also has a few that he made with friends his first year here. “My friends and I started doing silly shirt days where we’d get a two-dollar shirt from Michael’s and get iron-on letters or paint,” he says. At least one was worn to the point of falling apart. “So now it’s part of the quilt.”

Rovner majors in chemistry and minors in biology with a pre-nursing concentration. They plan to do the combined degree program that Goucher has with Notre Dame; after graduating from Goucher with a B.A., they’ll be able to gain a B.S. in nursing from Notre Dame in 15 months.

There will certainly be more shirts added to the collection between now and graduation next spring. Rovner thinks he should have enough for a queen size blanket. “There will be a binding of some kind around the edges,” he says. “Probably in Goucher blue.”