Family quilt

I have been playing around with Paint today to cover up grandbaby’s name on the Christening quilt, and although it looks a little off balance with that big empty blue covered up space, here is the finished quilt.

The pictures were taken on a sunny and windy day. Not first class picture taking conditions, but there were only two options – sunny & windy or no pictures at all. The edges are really perfectly straight as proven in this post.

 

If you haven’t been following the progress of this quilt, it was made for my grandbaby on his Christening day last weekend and holds the self portraits from his family on his mother’s side.

You can see the blue background here. It is made from leftover strips from another project, and quilted it with a variegated thread and straight line stitching which, I might add, is one of my favorite quilting styles. The Christening kept getting postponed, and so did finishing the quilt.

The self portraits were scanned and printed onto fabric sheets, and then appliquéd onto red felt and free motion stitched to the background.

You can see the stitching on the back, and also the label from this post.

I am very happy with the border-effect accomplished by leaving the outer edges portrait free.

I used Excel to print out the portraits which did not work perfectly as it distorts pictures a little when printing so we all look a little chunky around the cheeks.

If you want to make something similar, I can recommend the following:
- Start the collecting process early, or even better, two months before early.
- Set deadlines.
- Be prepared for some friendly nagging.
- It is ok to draw the line on who’s going to be included somewhere, or you’re going to end up with one giant quilt. I learned my lesson from the first family quilt I made that has hand silhouettes; they took forever to cut out and appliqué. This is a non-washable wall hanging, so using portraits from one side of the family was just right size wise.
- Not everyone is comfortable drawing themselves, so offering a generic face shape can be helpful. Of the 25 portraits on this quilt, only one used the provided shape.
- Having a spouse or parent or child draw someone is ok; the most important thing is having their portrait included.
- Ask for dark line drawings as soft pencil lines will wash out on print.
- Do a test print on paper to test the portrait sizes. Cut them apart and spread them out on the background. I did not do this and had to do everything twice.
- Very densely woven fabric sheets are great, but they don’t always handle fusible well. My first round of too large portraits had some less pretty mottle effect going on, so I used a different brand the second time.
- Keeping the background on the less busy side will make the portraits the focal point.
- I have made my letters and numbers like in my tutorial here. The font I have used is called Matisse and the size is 280.
- Write down the full name of everyone and how they are related to the recipient. I included all this information on the label.
- If you have one, do include a picture of yourself and the recipient on the label, it makes the special keepsake even more special.

Thanks for stopping by!