… and finally finished it last year!

When I was a junior in high school, my grandma asked if I wanted to make a quilt out of her scraps. She said she would help me cut out all the fabric and then show me how to stitch it together (by hand only). Grandma’s material was polyester double-knit and she had a lot of it! The pattern was Grandmother’s Flower Garden. I was able to get about 3/4′s of it stitched together before I started my senior year in high school and lost interest. I boxed everything up and completely forgot about it until 2005. Jim was being transferred to Scottsdale, Arizona and I was going through my craft stuff to see what I wanted to take with me. I decided to take this quilt with me and work on it down there since I wouldn’t be working.

After I finished stitching all the pieces together, I discovered that grandma and I had cut out enough pieces for a KING size quilt (it fits a queen size bed as a bedspread)! Upon the recommendation of the ladies at the fabric store, I used a very light weight t-shirt fabric since it would move with the polyester double-knit.

For the quilting, I stitched inside every hexagon (again by hand only). I set up my PVC quilt stand behind the couch and every night as Jim & I watched TV I would stitch. By the time I got the quilting done, I was sick of it and put it away for about 4 years before finally putting the binding on and getting it finished.

I’m so glad I finally finished it. I’m sure grandma would be so proud of me if she were still alive! Every time I look at it, I can see her in my mind’s eye wearing the dresses she made out of those scraps. Some of the scraps were things she made for me and my cousins. I even added some scraps from my mother-in-law’s scrap box of things she had made for my daughter when she was little. And my mother-in-law would especially be proud of me since I didn’t use the sewing machine on any of it. She always said quilts should only be hand sewn.

And a close up of the stitching inside each hexagon.