Stitching together memories

Without her comforting quilts, life would be so much colder, the memories, less vivid.

Meaningful and personal, Diane Trammell's rectangles of remembrance help make homesickness, hard times or a frosty winter night not quite as difficult to bear.

The squares she stitches together aren't scraps but the fabric of lives: well-worn T-shirts from races, meets and matches, black-and-white photographs superimposed on cloth, a mother's favorite holiday party dress, a son's only pair of jeans, favorite flannel shirts, nightgowns, even everyday boxers.

Wrapping up in a quilt made from these fragments is like receiving a hug from a certain time in someone's life -- high school, college, or a season on a close-knit soccer team -- or from a loved one who has passed away.

"I'm the kind of person that believes if you do something with your heart -- and you take the time and the caring -- it means something," says the 48-year-old Trammell, who started making memory quilts eight years ago.

Since 2000, she's made more than 160 of them for family members, family friends, colleagues, coaches, even people she's never met. Some are memorials. But most represent happy times. And almost all are made from T-shirts.

"The thing that I'm most thankful for is that I'm able to do this," says Trammell, whose quilts come in queen, twin and dorm size. (That's extra-long twin-size for those who don't have kids in college or can't remember because it's been so long.)

"I'm thankful I have this ability," Trammell says. "I just feel like this is a gift I've been given."

While she gives a humble explanation, recipients give thanks.

"It means a lot that she made one for me," says Alex Jensen, a freshman at Central Washington University and 2008 West Valley High School graduate.

Her quilt -- pink and orange and peppered with soccer and basketball tournament T-shirts -- covers her bed in Hitchcock Hall. Trammell gave it to her before she left for college.

"It just brings back memories," Jensen says. "It's almost 18 years of T-shirts. I think it shows Diane's really caring."

Trammell makes memory quilts for anyone who asks. She considers it her calling, a kind of community service. People have offered to pay, but she declines. Taking money for a gift from the heart would feel weird.

It costs her money to make the quilts. She buys the fabric and pays a seamstress to do the actual quilting. But Trammell does all the rest of the work herself: the cutting, piecing, backing, binding.

"It kind of takes over our house," she admits. "But I just think it's neat to be able to touch people's lives."

Her quilts help people cope. They also help people remember and just plain feel better. Warmer, too.

"They are a very special keepsake," says Becky Lang-Boyd, whose daughter -- 25-year-old Heidi Boyd of California -- received a quilt just before graduating from Davis High School in 2003. "They are clearly a labor of love."

Trammell can finish one in two or three nights if she works five or six hours each evening. Usually, though, a quilt takes a couple of weeks to complete. Each is machine washable -- and meant to be used.

"I want to see them at the soccer fields, covering the girls' legs," says Trammell, who works part-time as a financial specialist at Yakima County Aging and Long Term Care. "The more tattered they get, the better I feel. It means people are using them."

Trammell doesn't advertise. People hear about her quilts through word of mouth. Sometimes, they show up bearing a bag of T-shirts.

Other times, they don't want her to make one; they want to learn. Trammell has taught other moms -- about 20 or so -- to make memory quilts for their own kids. She gets ideas for patterns at the Yakima Valley Quilters Guild show every other year as well as the annual Central Washington Sate Fair.

She's been sewing her entire life. In fact, her first job right out of high school was sewing collars on ski jackets at a factory in Seattle.

When her mother died in a car accident in early 2000, she made her first two memory quilts -- one for herself, one for her twin sister -- out of her mother's T-shirts.

"When I gave it to my sister she reacted by bursting into tears," says Trammell, who went on to make quilts for all five of her nieces and nephews -- her mother's grandchildren -- with cloth from her favorite holiday party dress.

But she didn't want her quilts to solely commemorate sad occasions. So later the same year, she cut up some of her son's T-shirts.

Now, each of the Trammell children -- Chad, now 24 and a dental student at the University of Washington; 18-year-old Melissa, a freshman at Pepperdine University; and 23-year-old Megan Brown, a Yakima teacher -- have at least two quilts each.

Most people -- relatives, entire soccer teams, a mother whose 5-year-old died after injuries from a fall, an aunt whose nephew died in a trucking accident -- have just one.

And at least one man, the father of one of her bosses, is buried in a quilt she made.

Kirstie Munson, an 18-year-old Central freshman, keeps her quilt -- blue, star-studded and covered with old soccer jerseys -- on her bed.

"I'm really thankful for it," she says.

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