50th Anniversary Quilt

The quilt that I’m the most proud of is my parent’s 50th anniversary quilt. Some of you may recall that I previously blogged about this, but since the blog was lost, I wanted to recreate the post about my favorite quilt for Bloggers Quilt Festival.

I started planning the quilt about 5 months prior to their anniversary. My parents knew we were planning on giving them a party, but they didn’t know anything about the quilt. I wanted to do a signature quilt with blocks from all of their friends and family. But as I contemplated sending out fabric blocks and permanent pens, I thought there must be a better way. So, I drew several different size boxes on a piece of paper. I sent out the paper to their friends and family with instructions to write a message inside one of the boxes with a good felt tip pen. When I got the papers back, I cut out the messages using fancy scalloped scissors. I wanted to use the messages in the border, but didn’t have time to appliqué them. So, I took several messages and laid them on the scanner. I laid a background border of several strip pieced blocks on top of the messages. Then I scanned and printed the image onto Printed Treasures fabric on my inkjet printer. Since I used several of the background fabrics in the body of my quilt, it tied together very nicely. Here is how the border turned out.

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The images are 8 x 11 size sheets of fabric that I only had to sew together in sections. On the body of the quilt, I started with the garden twist pattern for the middle of the quilt. I put their wedding pictures and their parent’s pictures in the garden lattice and surrounded them with lace.

I found a beautiful fabric called Violet Postcards by Debbie Beaves. Since violets are my Mom’s favorite flower, and the postcards had a lot of beautiful sayings and poems, I thought it was the perfect fabric for an anniversary quilt. Here is the postcard fabric (the color looks like it is blue, but it is really purple.)

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I had a lot of fun searching for fabrics to match. After I pieced the middle of the quilt, I made up the rest of the quilt as I went along. I created tulip flowers with wedding pictures of myself and my 4 siblings along with grandchildren pictures. I named the quilt, Our Secret Garden for the “hidden” pictures in their “tulip garden”.  If you look closely, that’s my wedding picture in the bottom red flower.

For the corners of the quilt, I cut up my grandmother’s doilies.

For the back of the quilt, I printed a copy of the anniversary invitation to put in the corners along with the quilt label which reads

“Our Secret Garden”

One look, One smile,

One touch, One embrace,

One kiss, One love…

Two people, Two minds,

Two souls, Two destinies…

One road, One journey,

A few seeds

Many flowers now grow in our “Secret Garden”

I used a pink flower panel for the back, with a pale pink marbled border, and a prairie point edge.

I appliquéd their last initial

And this is a full view of the quilt

It was fun presenting the quilt at their party because everyone was in on it except my parents.  There were lots of tears, and my mother has dragged this quilt everywhere to show her friends.

I hope you enjoyed reading about this quilt as much as I enjoyed creating it and posting about it.  It was a nice trip down memory lane. Thank you for visiting my blog. I’m off to check out the other blogs for the Bloggers Quilt Festival. Thanks Amy for hosting the festival.

Karen