Golden Wedding Quilt

As promised a few weeks back, here is the next installment from my 'family quilt' archive.
This one is a bit special as it was made for my parents Golden Wedding Anniversary 11 years ago (they celebrated their diamond wedding last year!).



It is really a fabric photo album.

I had to give my father a really spurious excuse (something about research, I think) to get hold of the family photo albums. I selected photos of the whole family at different points through the years, from grandparents to babies, and I took them to a copy shop with a big bundle of white cotton pieces and got them to copy the photos on to the cotton. I seem to remember this all cost about £80! You could probably do it on your home printer these days.



I then just made a sort of scrappy log cabin design around the different sized photos. I had the centre piece photo (of mum and dad looking so happy and in love) framed in a gold metallic fabric.






It was all hand quilted. I clearly used to put a bit more effort in to this as there are some lovely, intricate quilting patterns, where I had filled in 'boring' areas with leaves and fish and circles.

I also wrote captions on the reverse of each of the photos with a laundry pen, just like people used to under photos in albums (or I suppose like they do now with comments on Facebook!).

Needless to say my parents were absolutely thrilled with the quilt. They had taken the whole family away for the weekend to Durham and I presented it to them in their hotel room. It was quite a moment. They have had it hung on the wall of their bedroom ever since and my mum loves to show it to visitors. It is bittersweet to know that I will one day get it back to keep.