Christmas Family Quilting

So with the outset of 2020, and the craziness of the pandemic, I got way more into my quilting. I went from working in an office and commuting 45 minutes to and from work everyday to getting to work from home, which was amazing, and gave me a lot of time to hone my skills.

About 3 months into working from home I decided that I wanted to make quilts for all the kids (my nieces and nephews) and my parents and in-laws, for Christmas. I started trying to figure out what would be the best thing to make, and I decided to try my hand at memory quilts, with photos. I used my oldest sons as the test, and bought some photo fabric and started trying to narrow down the million or so photos I had of him from the previous year and a half. I found some great inkjet photo fabric and started printing like crazy!

After the photos for my little guy came out ok, I solicited for photos from my brother and sister for their kids so that I could do the same for them. For my parents I got some photos from them, but also from my archives and that of my brother and sister, there was a lot of sifting to find good ones that would print well on the fabric. I think I ended up spending more time finding the photos and printing them than it ended up taking me to sew them all together.

These were definitely some of the most fun quilts for me to do. They were simple and yet complex. I made them so that each photo had a frame around it, and then for the actual quilting I was able to do a different design for each frame. It allowed me to be very creative on how to make it all flow together while making each photo unique. Being that not all of the photos were the same size, I got to be creative with each frame and got to flex my quilt math skills to make them all fit together.

These photo memory quilts are definitely a unique challenge, but so worth the time and effort that went into making them. I think they came out pretty amazing.