November 4, 2014

Back in the day, I really wanted to pass hand crafting skills on to my daughter. So, when Hayley was in elementary school –home on sick days, or she just had days off of school, I had her practice embroidery skills by outlining pictures of animals with embroidery thread. I traced pictures of animals Hayley liked onto fabric squares from a coloring book using a window or a light box. (I can’t remember.)

Here is an example of one of the blocks.

After Hayley had six blocks done, I put them into a simple quilt I hoped one day she could share with her own children.

To make the quilt memorable, I traced the outline of everybody’s hands in our house around the quilt

and used the hand prints as part of the quilting.

It is fun to see what Hayley’s hand print looked like then.

And our son Ben’s hand print

and our youngest son Wesley’s hand prints when he was a baby.

He is 20 now.

I sent Hayley a few pictures of this quilt.  This Thanksgiving she will be visiting us with her husband and her daughter, Matilda. She said she wants to take the quilt home with her for her new little one.  That warms my heart.

It is so nice to see the full circle of a project. The baby quilt is making it’s way back to the person it was originally made

for…which is Matilda and any of her future siblings.