Dear Friends,

One Saturday morning, I was busy making breakfast for my 6-year-old son, Andrew. Well, funny enough, he was upstairs in his room making a mess of his own. When I went to announce the most perfect pancakes ever, I found six years worth of t-shirts strewn throughout his bedroom. Of the forty-three shirts, only eight still fit, but we spent the next two hours telling stories about all the others that didn’t. We remembered our trip to Cincinnati, his first tee-ball team the “Milkshakes,” his kindergarten art show where they all wore matching teddy bear t-shirts and sang songs to the weepy parents, and so much more.

Andrew's quilt! (Click for closer look)

And even though I definitely didn’t have the room to keep all the outgrown shirts (especially as I had a flash forward to ten more years of them) I just could not bear to throw them away. And I thought… I bet there are other people like me… with piles of shirts stored in a closet… So here we are… Retrospreads!

Now, we are making new memories. Every time we go on a picnic in the park (one of our favorite Mommy/Andrew dates), someone always stops to ask where I got my t-shirt quilt. The power of the past is amazing, isn’t it? I have a quilt made of my old sorority shirts and Andrew loves for me to tell him stories from the shirts – what it was like to tailgate in The Grove at Ole Miss, which party it was where mommy had to dress up like a boy, and on and on and on. And maybe one day, Andrew will take that first quilt of his and tell his wife or his son all the stories of his shirts – even the one where he watched the baby hippo at the zoo for over an hour for no apparent reason. We all love to tell our stories.

Thank you so much for allowing us to be a part of the stories you have to tell. I hope you enjoy your quilt as much as you enjoyed making the memories behind it.