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If you’re a mother, you have most likely made many trips to the used clothing bin to unload the endless supply of old clothing your children seem to outgrow faster than you can buy it.
It seems a great waste to simply throw out clothing that is so expensive and worn for such a short time. Some things we may hold on to because it has sentimental value or we remember how adorable our child looked in it. Many times, clothing that is stained or ripped is thrown in the garbage or used for cleaning rags, but you can take those old clothes and make them into something your children will pass down to their children and cherish forever.
Family heirlooms are becoming a thing of the past as more and more of what we own becomes cheap and disposable. The things we own now just don’t seem to mean as much to us as the things our grandparents worked so hard to acquire. There is so much wealth in our country today that we just don’t have the same sense of value as our ancestors. Heirlooms are important though and they tell the history of our family. It is important to give something to our children to carry on their memories with and give them a sense of belonging to a family.
One of the greatest family heirlooms is a quilt. While you are sorting your child’s outgrown clothes, put aside those that are stained or torn or those that make you smile when you remember your child wearing it. Cut the clothing into symmetrical squares, making sure to cut squares small enough so that you will be able to get at least one full square out of each piece of clothing you use. Save these squares of clothing until you have enough to make a quilt.
The quilt does not have to be huge, but it should be large enough that it won’t get lost in a shuffle of moving or re-organizing. The squares can be easily sewn together and even if you don’t sew or know how to do a quilt stitch, you can take your squares and have the sewn together by a seamstress, a professional quilter or even a senior citizen’s group. When your quilt is done it will be a veritable host of memories for you and your child and you can embroider the child’s name and birth date on the blanket to start its journey through the family.
Another thing you can make from your child’s old clothing is a pillow. Cut tiny squares of the fabric from old clothes and sew them together much like a tiny quilt. You can make one side of the pillow of a plain fabric or use two sides of ‘mini quilt’, Sew the two sides together and stuff with a pillow form or fiber fill and stitch shut.
With the extra scraps of material left over from your square cutting, you can tie strips of the cloth together and make a braided rug. The rug, pillow and quilt will make a warm and loving bedroom set that your child can use until he leaves home, after which he will certainly want to bring his heirlooms with him.
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