Cheap Ts

If you've been hanging around here for any length of time, you know that I'm a rather picky individual, especially regarding clothing, and that often leaves me searching for solutions to problems of my own creation. But as someone who enjoys the hunt, so to speak, I've come to appreciate when those solutions arrive from unusual or unexpected sources.

For example, I don't care for white undershirts. I have a few of them, which mainly get deployed under light-colored dress shirts, but I generally wear gray ones. Sometimes, though, gray isn't quite right. In between white and gray is a marled fabric that's usually referred to as "ash." I try to have at least a couple of T-shirts in this color, but it's not so easy to find.

Several years ago, at a point when I was trying to find replacement ash T-shirts, I happened to accompany the Mrs. on one of her craft-store odysseys. I tend to wait in the car on these trips, but it was probably summer and being in an air-conditioned store was preferable. I wandered around and discovered a whole aisle of inexpensive, solid-color T-shirts, being sold for use in craft projects.

I was very happy to find that the store, A.C. Moore, carried the shirts in ash, and bought a few. I'm mentioning it now because I noticed while looking through Sunday's paper that A.C. Moore has the T-shirts on sale this week, for $3 each. That's an excellent price for any T-shirt, and if you are the sort of person who likes to wear plain white T-shirts in the summer, these are a bit more substantial than your typical Hanes or Fruit of the Loom multipack items (making them somewhat less translucent, and thus somewhat more dignified). You could buy half a dozen and use them, sequentially or in rotation, until they no longer look pristine. Plenty of other colors are available, too.

Of course, you're at the mercy of whatever the store happens to have in stock, as I learned last night when I tried to buy a replacement batch of ash T-shirts. Or maybe there just aren't any A.C. Moore stores convenient to where you live. Don't worry, I have a solution for that too: CheapesTees. Here you'll find a much wider selection: in addition to Gildan (the brand carried at A.C. Moore), they have Anvil, Jerzees, Champion, along with more robust offerings from the above-mentioned Hanes and FOTL.

Some of the brands carried offer lighter-weight fabric options, likely preferable if you typically wear another shirt over your T. Pay attention to the pricing though. Sometimes the price shown is for a white shirt, while colored shirts cost more; sometimes the reverse is true, with the colored-shirt price shown and white shirts at a lower price. A simple "as low as..." would help clear this up, but in lieu of that solution you'll just have to read carefully.