From mother to son

Birthdays are important milestones, and an 18th birthday is especially significant. It marks the time when a teen officially transitions from childhood to adulthood. When Melissa Pittz, a social worker at Colbert Elementary School, thought about her son, Andy’s, 18th birthday, she knew she wanted to give him a memorable gift.

“I’d made a T-shirt quilt for my dad’s birthday several years ago,” she said. She remembered she had boxes full of Andy’s outgrown sports jerseys and T-shirts and decided to create a similar quilt for him.

Pittz doesn’t describe herself as an avid quilter. “I made the quilt that’s on my bed,” she said. “It was supposed to be a pillow.” Still, she started pulling out boxes.

Andy is a senior at Mt. Spokane High School, so the school colors of navy and maroon were a natural choice for the color scheme. As she chose the shirts to use, a red, white and blue pattern emerged. The backing was easy to pick. “I wanted a baseball quilt,” Pittz said. She chose a soft cream fabric dotted with red baseball mitts and brown bats. Her son plays for Mt. Spokane, and has played on many league teams as well.

For Pittz, going through her son’s outgrown shirts was a chance to recapture the boy he once was while making a gift to celebrate the young man he has become. She stitched 36 squares in all, each one unique. A Cub Scout uniform shirt has prominence in one corner. A Colbert fun run T-shirt and several Hoopfest shirts are included but the quilt is mostly crafted from baseball jerseys. Pittz carefully cut off the buttons and patches and recreated the shirts in miniature on the quilt. Even the tiny knit collars are aligned in just the right spot.

“It’s a perfect thing to do when your kid is getting ready to take off and leave the nest,” she said. “It’s cheap therapy.”

Pittz compares the art of quilting to child rearing. “You start out with raw materials and run into some challenges,” she said with a laugh. One of her challenges was running out of backing fabric the night before the quilt was due at the professional quilters. Her husband made a late night dash to the store for more.

When her project was ready she took it to Adobe Quilting in Greenbluff. “They do a fabulous job,” she said. She told the mother/daughter team of Rita Sadberry and Sarah Cotter she wanted a baseball quilt, so Cotter designed a special stipple. For this quilt Cotter stitched a random intricate pattern of baseballs, gloves and bats that are almost invisible until you look closely.

Finally, the long-awaited day arrived. “I know this is probably a bigger deal for me than for Andy,” Pittz said.

But her son was delighted by this gift of love. “It’s the best gift I could have received because it will stick with me forever,” he said.

He thought his gift might be connected to the long hours his mother spent in her sewing room. “I could hear her downstairs almost every day working on something,” Andy said. “Every year as I grow older it will mean more to me because it will bring back all the memories I made while wearing those jerseys and shirts.”