I've been on a bit of a sewing and quilting hiatus, as the arrival of Jonah Robert on June 28th commanded the vast majority of my attention. Now that he's a bit older and is sleeping longer stints through the night and going longer between feedings, I've been able to make little pockets of time to work on some craft projects. At the top of my priority list was a project for Grandma and Grandpa's 60th wedding anniversary, October 1.
While Gabby was out and we were at the IQF in Chicago in April, we visited a booth with a display of a quilt called "My Family Quilt" from the Whimsicals book, If Quilts Could Talk. While it featured applique, a technique of which I am not fond, I thought it was perfect as the pictures printed to fabric and text were appropriate for a 60th anniversary, and the size was such that it didn't seem too overwhelming. Gabby was kind enough to buy the book for me as a gift, and I began thinking about what exactly I might want to do with the project.
I started on this very shortly after Jonah was born, but it has taken me until Sunday to completely finish it. The main challenge was in getting the blasted photos printed to fabric. It should NOT be that hard, but our home printer - the ink jet one required for printing to fabric - was having major issues and refuses now to render color properly. I took the files to work to print on the printer there, but the files were corrupted somehow in the process and I had to recreate them all. Then, when I was finally able to print again, I discovered that the work printer was also refusing to render color properly. So the project sat and sat until Ben was able to print them on the neighbor's printer (thank you a million, Kathy Cayen)! From there, it went pretty quickly in terms of the construction.
I used almost exclusively Daiwabos and Daiwabo scraps from my stash. The trims were purchased from Etsy (thanks to Susan Sponberg for her suggestion to look there). I'd purchased additional trims, but to be honest, wasn't exactly sure how to apply some of them. And others had means of application that were just too large for the scale of this project (most of these images are in the 2-3-inch square range and the entire project is about 40" wide by 16" tall). I love the oversized rick rack, one of several color options I purchased from Tammy Tadd Designs, and the manner in which the border, rick rack, and center were applied was really slick, even if it does "waste" fabric. The rick rack just lies so flat!!
I presented it as a gift to Grandma and Grandpa this morning, and I think they loved it, even if it was nearly two months late.
