There are certain things you don’t realize will matter until enough time has passed.
The hospital bracelet. The admission ticket. A handwritten card. The invitation to a party you planned for months. A photograph you’ve seen a hundred times but still can’t bring yourself to put away.
I’ve always been a keeper of things– I still have shoeboxes filled with memories from middle and high school– but motherhood made me understand why.
For anyone new here, I’m Megan Pinckney Rutherford, founder of PINCK and the Future Matriarch movement—a space rooted in the idea that the lives we’re building today eventually become what we leave behind. I think a lot about inheritance, not simply in terms of what we own, but the traditions, stories, places and everyday objects that help explain who we were.
Which is probably why my relationship with Petite Keep has always felt so natural.
Petite Keep Has Been Part of My Motherhood Story From the Beginning
I discovered Petite Keep when Teagan was a baby, when both the brand and I were in the early seasons of our stories. Petite Keep was hardly a year old, while Teagan was hardly one month, where I received my first trunk. When I think back to the beginning of this partnership, I think back to my tiny baby lying inside his new keepsake trunk.
At the time, I was thinking about all the little pieces of his childhood I wanted to save. His first clothes, hospital keepsakes, birthday cards and the tiny things that seem so routine until suddenly your baby is no longer a baby.
Years later, his Petite Keep trunk has become exactly what I hoped it would: a home for pieces of a childhood that went by much faster than I expected. Inside there are Halloween costumes I have made, crafts and artwork from his days at school, his first plane ticket, among soo much more.
That is what I’ve always loved about Petite Keep. Their personalized keepsake trunks are beautiful enough to live in your home rather than being relegated to an attic, but they are made with the idea that what goes inside is ultimately what makes them valuable. Petite Keep now makes trunks for babies and children, weddings, college years, sororities and other milestones, with different sizes, prints and personalization options.
They give us a designated place to keep the evidence of a life being lived.
And now, after years of filling Petite Keep trunks with pieces of my own family’s story, I got to design one.
Introducing the Petite Keep Tastemaker Series
This year, Petite Keep invited five creatives—Alison Kenworthy of Homeworthy, interior designer James Farmer, lifestyle and interior creator Kellie Brown, artist and textile designer Camilla Moss and little ole me—to create limited-edition Signature Prints for the Petite Keep Tastemaker Series. Each design was intended to reflect the tastemaker’s personal style, story and the experiences that have shaped our creative life.
My print is called The Legacy Weave.
And despite how many pretty things I love, I knew almost immediately that I didn’t want to create a pattern that was simply pretty. If I was going to design something meant to hold memories, I wanted the design itself to carry memory, too.
The Story Behind My Legacy Weave Petite Keep Trunk
The Legacy Weave is inspired by the places and people that have shaped me: my Gullah Geechee heritage, my Charleston roots, African artistry and craftsmanship, Southern lineage and the women whose lives made mine possible.
The pattern draws inspiration from the geometry and repetition found in African textiles and the woven artistry of Lowcountry sweetgrass baskets. Both traditions remind me that beautiful things can also be useful things—and that something made by hand can carry knowledge from one generation into the next.
But typically when you find African Wax it features bold primary colors. I wanted my print to feel more like me, so I leaned on the colors of my hometown of Charleston to lead this design. I chose two shades of blue. First is haint blue, a color deeply associated with West African beliefs that has since permeated throughout Charleston’s culture and can be seen on the ceilings of porches all throughout the Lowcountry. The next is a deeper indigo blue, for plant that was cultivated for the first time within the colonies in Charleston thanks to the knowledge of the enslaved people who’s homeland had been cultivating it for generations. The shades of pink was a play on my brand name yes, but was truly inspired by the local camellias and the pink houses scattered across Charleston’s peninsula. That soft, almost romantic color that feels so much a part of the landscape I grew up knowing. And if you look closely, you’ll see cream rings that were meant to mimic the weave to sweetgrass baskets– an art and skill that was brought over by the enslaved, but preserved through generations of women who knew the importance of passing it down. Now, sweetgrass baskets are one of Charleston most recognizable symbols and to me are a reminder of how intricate our ancestors were in developing this city.
Petite Keep describes The Legacy Weave as honoring “the artistry of West African skills and the women whose stories are woven into every generation.”
And it’s that last part may be what matters most to me! Because I wanted the print to feel connected to heritage without feeling trapped in the past. I wanted something that could belong to my grandmother, to me, and someday to someone who hasn’t even been born yet. Because that is how I think an heirloom should work!!
What Do You Put in a Keepsake Trunk or Memory Box?
Whether you’re looking for a baby memory box, wedding keepsake trunk, college keepsake trunk or simply a place to preserve your family’s memories, I think the best ones are when the vessel is just as meaningful as what’s inside.
Of course, not every object we save needs to be centuries old—or even particularly important to anyone else.
A wedding keepsake trunk might hold your invitation, veil, handwritten vows, a champagne cork or letters from the people who celebrated with you. A baby memory box or personalized children’s trunk might eventually fill with hospital keepsakes, first outfits, artwork, birthday cards and photographs. A college or sorority keepsake trunk can become the place for letters from friends, programs, pins, graduation cords and the little pieces of four years that are surprisingly difficult to explain twenty years later. Petite Keep specifically designs collections around many of these seasons of life.
But I think there’s another way to approach a keepsake trunk, too:
Build one around your family’s story.
Put in the recipe card written in your grandmother’s handwriting. The program from the family reunion. Your mother’s old scarf. A note explaining the Christmas tradition everyone participates in but no one remembers who started. A photograph of the house where everybody gathered. A child’s drawing of that house. A newspaper clipping. Old legal documents. A church fan. A menu. A letter.
Whatever you add, just make sure to write it all down!!! The names, dates, places, relationships, reason why you saved something, who it belonged to, the story everybody in the family knows right now but assumes someone else will remember later. It’s all important because preserving the object is only half the work.
Don’t Just Save the Heirlooms. Save the Context.
The older I get, the more I realize that the things we inherit are only as meaningful as the stories that accompany them.
A beautiful photograph becomes infinitely more valuable when someone has written the names of the people in it on the back. A recipe becomes something different when you know whose kitchen it came from. A seemingly ordinary piece of fabric becomes an heirloom when you know who wore it and where she was going.
This idea has become central to everything I’m building through Future Matriarch: a matriarch isn’t just preserving assets or recipes. She’s preserving context.
That’s what I hope The Legacy Weave eventually represents.
Yes, I hope someone chooses it because the pink and blue are beautiful in her home. I hope it becomes a baby shower gift, a wedding gift, a graduation gift or the trunk someone buys herself because she finally decided her own memories were worth preserving.
But more than anything, I hope she fills it!! I hope she puts the beautiful things inside alongside the ordinary ones. I hope she writes down the stories she thinks she’ll never forget. I hope decades from now, someone opens that trunk and doesn’t simply find a collection of old things. I hope they’ll find enough pieces to understand the woman who came before them.
Because the most beautiful thing we can pass down isn’t simply proof that we were here. It’s enough context for those who come after us to know who we were.
Xx MPR
This post was sponsored by Petite Keep (and contains affiliate links), but all thoughts are my own.
Event imagery by @KatieNiemiec
