Check out this lovely pillow cover I made:

I know, it really doesn’t look like anything special, but it has a whole lot of history behind it.

SW spent a few years in public school, and in that time had some wonderful people come into his life. One of them was his speech teacher, Mrs. Gatewood. She was one of those rare people you encounter in life: full of love, patience and understanding. SW’s speech classes were always the highlights of his week. And all the fun they had together truly paid off, as Mrs. Gatewood helped Sean learn how to comfortably make eye contact, how to have two way conversations, a lot about interacting with people, and helped him conquer some difficult enunciations.

When the time came for SW to “graduate” from speech he was pretty sad. But Mrs. Gatewood gave him a wonderful graduation present: a beautiful tie-dyed T-shirt. For years that has been his favorite shirt and has been worn and washed and worn and washed again until it literally began to fall apart. The pockets started falling off, the neckband was separating, and little holes were appearing everywhere. Still he wanted to wear it as often as possible; even though I no longer allowed it in public (at least I tried.)

But finally the shirt reached the point of too far gone, but before there was nothing salvageable from it, I convinced SW to let me get a little creative. At the store the other day he picked out a small pillow form. I cut pieces from the shirt that for the most part aren’t full of holes and backed them with some plain quilt fabric. Then I stitched them together into a cover to slip on the pillow form. He loves it; he would barely let go of it long enough for me to take the picture.

Thank you Mrs. Gatewood, for everything you did for us and for all the wonderful memories too!