Years ago, I came across two boxes of recipes in a pile of discarded items at an estate sale. Having grown up in a family where homemade food cooked from saved and shared recipes is an essential ingredient in the glue that holds generations together, the thought of a collection of family recipes being discarded broke my heart. I rescued the boxes and brought them home. Since then, I've gathered other collections of recipes--some handwritten on cards, others clipped from newspapers or magazines. Each tells a story of the collected lives of a family--weekday night suppers, holiday gatherings, birthday parties, baby showers, summer picnics. Over time, I began to imagine saving the recipes by stitching them together into something worthy of saving: heirloom quilts that could be passed from generation to generation.