Tthe ultimate useless gift was from my MIL. She said she would be making us a quilt for our wedding, which at first I thought was awesome as I love handmade quilts and have a small collection, and we use them too, so I was kind of excited.
And then I saw the monstrosity she was making.
She decided instead of a pieced traditional quilt (in the pattern of "wedding ring" which is what I was hoping for - or hell, any traditional pieced quilt pattern) she wanted to do a mother/daughter embroidery pattern that had 12 different scenes showing the mother helping the daughter with her veil, putting on her shoes, adjusting her train... (um, she's not my mom, she's my husband's mom and yes, he is a guy, I'm the girl). She sucks at embroidery, so that was scary in itself, but the pattern itself was in the style of the scary/hideous "precious moments" or holly hobby old fashioned style... really, really ugly (and I like retro, but this was NOT good retro, just horrible), and then proceeded to use cheap day-glow white polyester bridal "satin" fabric and sewed on a bunch of cheap metal charms and tassels EVERYWHERE. And she ironed on the patterns without testing the fabric first, and it didn't wash out, there were some slight singed areas where she had the iron too hot and burned the polyester and it had badly done embroidery with all of the tracing lines visible... honestly it looked just awful.
And it wasn't even useable as a quilt, as it was purely decorative and she sized it so small it would look ridiculous and have to "float" on top of a regular comforter/bed spread. And the first time she showed it to us, our two cats LUNGED towards the hypnotically swaying tassels and charms that seemed specially included to become cat toys. One of my cats chews up ribbon and both were black cats, so a giant white gaudy monstrosity on a bed would be destroyed in about 5 minutes if we even liked it enough to display. I still don't know for sure if she intentionally made it horrible as a big "fuck you" for us daring to get married, or if she really was so delusional that she thought it was pretty. Honestly, it could be either.
And she brought it to the wedding and insisted on showing it off... and this was the only wedding gift we received from his parents. And yes, his mom is a crazy person who we had a whole lot of issues with and is currently cut off (she's the psycho narcissistic type).
I cut off the part with out names and wedding date and donated the piece of shit to a thrift store (with the husband's complete agreement) with the hopes that someone might want to cut out some of the useable fabric for their own project, or else use as a dog bed or something.
Oh! and for the next couple of christmas presents, she gave us a knitted baby blanket - one blanket about 3 x 4 foot square, for the both of us knitted from scratchy cheap polyester yarn. We didn't have (and never had) kids.
She puts the "ass" in passive/aggressive.
