Stay At Home Wife and Mom: Family Memory Quilt!

While planning for our trip I decided I wanted to make something for my father-in-law. We finally settled on a family memory quilt. We got the kids to stand mostly still for pictures and sent them off to these wonderful gals in International Falls, Minnesota to get them printed on fabric.

In the meantime, I went through my fabric stash and found the backing-a sheet just waiting for a repurpose project. We went online to JoAnn's and found some wonderful complimenting fabric. It just struck me yesterday that I made a sunflower quilt. Hm. Oh well.

I cut my pieces 12 by 12... But then I realized my photos were only 5 x6.. This is only my second quilt, bear with me here!!! But that is why some of the pieces are a little uneven.

After I sewed all the squares together we realized we wanted a little more.. So I printed off some pretty font, traced over it with a sharpie, laid that paper behind my yellow fabric, traced over it with pencil, then hand embroidered the kid's names and birthdays. That was really the hardest part. I kept looking on Pinterest to make sure I was getting the stitches right, I'd never done any actual embroidery work before. I don't think I did too bad-though it would have been A LOT easier if we had decided on that BEFORE the squares were sewn together.

So my pictures are from the piecing together stages.

Back layer-it's a dark brown color

Quilt batting layer. Smooth everything out then we are ready for the top layer.

Top layer. Smooth it all out, make sure the layer edges line up. I pinned the corners to start off with the keep it still then proceeded with the tying together.

No, that's not a fish hook, that's a curved needle. I tied Hannah's quilt with a regular needle and was SO SO grateful when a friend gave me this. That is wool yarn cut for a latch hook rug, but it works for this. It was really thick, so I was able to take the strands apart.

All tied up! You can see my uneven square. Leave it up to Eva to be difficult! lol

Close up of the ties.

Next came the binding. I tried to use my scraps I had... but there wasn't enough. So I found this tutorial on YouTube on how to make your own binding and did it mostly that way with leftover material from the brown.