The Four Generations Quilt is Done

 Hello, everyone.

For the last months, well, a lot of months actually, the Four Generations Quilt has been slowly approaching its completion.

Now it's done!

This is only a photo of part of the quilt, folded and lying on the quilt stand, as we don't have stray extra people to hold it up at its full size for the photo.

This quilt was begun in the late 1950's or early 1960's by DH's DGM. She was working with the usual type of cotton prints for the time period and she was making applique blocks. This is raw-edge applique with the black blanket stitches both serving to hold things together and to decorate the butterfly edges. She added embroidered antennae to each butterfly. The muslin squares, each of which holds four butterflies, are approximately 18 inches across.

DH's DGM passed away before she finished the squares. They laid, unnoticed, for many years in a box, until her daughter, my dear MIL, began going through the things and found them. She took up the project, using the fabrics and templates in the box until she ran out, and then obtaining more fabric pieces from me to complete the butterflies.

One day a box of butterfly squares arrived in the mail.

I added the sashing (black) and borders (blue fabrics) and some smaller butterflies around the edges to accent the big ones. Then I tried hand quilting the project. 

Unfortunately, life was much too busy for a hand quilting project of this size, and so the quilt languished, again, for years before it was taken up again.

The first hand-quilting stitches are still there, but I finished quilting it with my machine. (Most of the quilting was by machine.)

I added the initials of the other ladies who worked with me on it to the quilting in the borders. (My DD also did some stitching on the quilt.)

It is a privilege to have worked together with these ladies of the family on this project.

In a future post, I might put up a photo of the whole thing stretched out. After enough other folks are around to hold it up!