- Love those old shirts

Mary Chapin Carpenter's song This Shirt never fails to bring tears to my eyes. However, I have not one, but many old shirts that hold precious memories.

Patch #136 is from one of my all-time favorites ...

And it's perfect because today would have been my Mom's 85th birthday. If only ... but no, she departed this life in 2008.

Some of her shirts are still in my closet, others have been worn to the point of threadbare and now reside on my stitching-cloth table. The one that contributed to today's patch was my nightshirt for many years. Pieces of it have appeared in the Close Your Eyes and Close Your Eyes Too books that I stitched for G and J. Other pieces became a part of my Hearts for Charleston quilt square and Mending patches. You can find Index links to those projects in the right side-bar.

Today, another of Mom's shirts became the background for retrospective Patch #102, which began as both a spin on Don's wooden patchwork for J ...

and Jude Hill's recent posts about stacked running stitch ...

The only problem was, I liked the back even better ...

So, you can either go back to the April 11 post to see the patch in its final form or you can click the Retrospective Index link in the right side-bar to see my progress on all of the belated patches that I've been slowly catching up on ...