June 18, 2025
By: Bill Conger
Seamstress and quilter Elizabeth Pruitt, the owner of Quilts, Memories, and Sew Much More, has founded a special niche that has created rave reviews and swelled into a massive business. Pruitt started the memory bears from her DeKalb County home ten years ago when her dad, a college history professor at Westbrook College in Portland, Maine passed away. He always wore blue striped or solid blue oxford cloth shirts. Among a huge pile of her dad’s shirts, she found the perfect one to use, an orange and gray plaid Seersucker.
“I made the bear and I showed it off on Facebook. People just loved it!” Pruitt explained to WJLE from her sewing room. A very large computerized quilting machine fills part of the room with many of her ongoing projects organized to her liking.
The popularity of the bears began to extend beyond Smithville when she created a listing for them in her Etsy shop, QuiltsandMemoriesUS. “My goodness gracious! I have made 1,700 bears in the last four or five years for people all over the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Australia.
Pruitt is invited into the lives of people’s loved ones who are grieving deceased family or cherished friends. They often send photos of the person who died wearing the clothes along with a personal letter explaining the significance, and sometimes they are accompanied by the people’s obituaries.
“A lot of them that stand out to me are the young adults, who didn’t get a chance live their life. Those are the ones that seem to choke me up a little bit. This one woman lost her 17-year-old son in a car accident, and one of the shirts in the box was the shirt he wore when he died in the car. That gets me. When I got the bears all done and I sent them to her, she had a gathering of his friends, and she had a picture of her son and the friend wearing the shirt that she gave to the friend. Now they’re sitting there holding the bear that I made from the shirt. That’s just heartbreaking.”
Pruitt will receive unique items like a handmade 1963 prom dress made from red velour material with eggshell white colored lacing across the top. She made two bears that looked just like the dress.
“A girl sent me her wedding dress, and I made a bride and a groom bear from her wedding dress. He was wearing a little vest and the bride bear was wearing a little veil. It was really cute.”
She was asked to create a bear from the fabric of a grandpa’s favorite recliner that was camouflage with a deer pattern.
“There’s so many things that people can come up with like favorite blankets, favorite quilts, even fabric luggage. They cut all the fabric off it because mom had traveled the world with that piece of luggage. They had me make a bear from the luggage fabric. It was crazy, but it was pretty cool when it was done.”
Pruitt’s bears garner praise, strong reviews and thank you notes from those who now have a tangible memory to literally hold.
“Here’s a whole story that I got from somebody,” Pruitt explains as she reads one of the letters in her collection. “I’m sending you a flannel shirt. Lavender is my wife’s favorite color. My wife’s name is Cynthia. She passed away from breast cancer 10 days ago. Ten days before he sends me a shirt for a bear.”
Normally, for shipping orders Pruitt allows a lead time of six to eight weeks to create the memory bear, but she can squeeze local folks into a shorter time frame. Before the memory bears, Pruitt had already been tackling a myriad of projects from hemming and sewing to t-shirt quilts and most recently custom rug tufting. She lends her crafty hands to non-profits at times including a genealogy tree that is planned for Alexandria. It’s quite the feat to juggle all her sewing jobs.
“I’m too easily distracted,” she admits with a smile. “I’ll think I’ve got to cut those shirts. let me go make a bear, wait a minute, I’ve got to work on this dress. It’s just like, dishes are in the sink. I got to go put the dishes in the dishwasher. That’s part of being here at home. It’s like focus. You can do this.”
Starting as a teenager, Pruitt has been sewing for more than 40 years.
“My mother taught me how to read patterns and how to sew,” she says. “One of the first things I ever made was a little peach corduroy flower girl dress for my older sister’s wedding back when I was about 13 years old. That was my first experience in sewing. But I didn’t do anything for the longest time until I had the kids [Bailey and Grayson]. Then, it was just pretty much a hobby until people knew I could do hemming. It just grew from there.”
Pruitt will be giving a live demonstration of her craft at the DeKalb County Fair on Thursday, June 26 at 6:00, 7:00, and 8:00 p.m.