Bedtime Stories

Warm Memories in Grad’s T-Shirt Quilt

While packing up before moving to South Carolina to join Teach for America, Jaishri Shankar ’13 realized she had accumulated an entire wardrobe’s worth of Terp T-shirts over her four years at Maryland.

Each shirt had a story behind it: the first “Gold Rush” tee given out before the men’s basketball team beat Duke in 2010, one with Testudo wearing a sombrero from her senior-year bar crawl across College Park, and a black tee proclaiming “Let’s Tour S’more,” the Dairy’s ice cream flavor celebrating Maryland Imagers. “I wanted a way to preserve the most significant memories I had at Maryland,” she says.

Shankar, who teaches eighth-grade science, had the company Project Repat stitch a quilt from 30 Terp tees, linking together the Maryland memories she didn’t want to let go.