A nap down memory lane

If you have a toddler in the house, you’re aware of just how frequently their clothes, socks and shoes need to be replaced with a size bigger. This means that often, the older ones are passed on to other children in the family or kept in a trunk as keepsake.

However, Mumbai has caught up with the international trend of making toddler-sized blankets out of old clothes, called memory quilts. The patchwork quilts contain pieces of first dresses, first pillows, hand towels and even booties, and can cost anywhere between Rs 3,000 and Rs 16,000 to make.

Harshita Gupta, who has been making these memory quilts for parents all over the country, explains, “I hadn’t even heard about the concept till my own son turned two recently. I wanted to have a backdrop to his birthday party, a kind of a photo wall. Then I came across the idea of a memory quilt randomly, where I could put his old clothes and create a background with it. I heard about the concept on a trip to the US too. So I thought I’d give it a shot with my son Atharv’s old clothes.”

The e-marketer says that the idea caught on like wildfire when she went ahead and made some quilts for her family and friends, even sending some abroad. “I come from a family of textile merchants and marketers, so we have the entire set-up and it was easy for me to make these. Initially, I didn’t have a lot of orders, but there were a lot of people enquiring about the concept. I’ve only been doing this for a few months, and I’ve already helped people with more than 200 quilts!”

San Francisco-based Akshay Java and Pinky Rijhwani too have been looking towards India to help make a memory quilt for their one-and-a-half year old daughter, Samiha. “Initially I was thinking of donating all of the clothes she doesn’t fit in anymore,” says Pinky. “But when I was scanning through them, I realised there were so many dresses I didn’t feel like parting with — like her first outfit, her first month birthday dress and more. That’s when I saw someone share a link about memory quilts and I became curious about it. I realised this was the perfect option to not part with those dresses, yet have something she could use.”

Harshita says that mothers often approach her to help her make these memory quilts because their traditions forbid giving hand-me-down clothes to other babies. “Sometimes in conservative families, parents are asked to not pass on their infants’ clothes, but to keep them in the trunk. Instead, this is a better way to preserve memories. Some moms tell me that their kids are grown-up teenagers, and that they want to make a memory quilt to eventually gift it to them when they get married.”

Pinky quickly adds that the whole point of having memory quilts made for toddlers is for them to use it and not for it to be just another keepsake. “I want Samiha to use the quilt. That’s the most important part of it. Else I could’ve just stored it in a trunk,” she adds.

Quilts with clothes aren’t the only requests parents have. “We even try to incorporate cuddle toys, first booties, soft shoes and even soft picture books,” informs Harshita.

On the other hand, Atul Raniwala, another customised children’s quilt-maker says that photograph based blankets are quite the rage too. “We’ve seen the demand for customised quilts go up by about 20 per cent in the recent past. We end up making a lot of quilts with children’s photographs on them too. What has happened is that we’ve seen mothers become a lot more active about what they want for their children.”

Atul too agrees that the quilt is a rather precious object for all mothers, “We had a mother approach us with old baby clothes and discussed in meticulous detail about what she needs and how she needed the quilt. We kept her informed every bit of the way while we added our creativity and inputs.”