A Special Quilt

I have always enjoyed picking Grace up from school and checking her mailbox - not necessarily looking for what she had learned that day but what she had drawn (most often it was an animal of some sort). We would bring the pictures home and display them on the fridge or on her art clip rack. Somehow I felt the desire to do something special with them. That is how this quilt came to be.

I had originally planned a quilt that was much larger in size to incorporate approximately thirty-five of her drawings. But as I put more thought into the time it would take to hand embroider, piece, then quilt that many blocks I opted to scale the project back a bit. I couldn't be happier with the results....


The finished quilt measures 58 inches long by 36 inches wide. It contains 15 blocks of Grace's artwork, 14 being animals and 1 being her self-portrait (if you click on the picture it gives a better view of the blocks). Each block is a hand embroidered replica of her original art (including the color crayon/colored pencil that she used). The quilt layout was inspired by this post (here).


This is the center block. Grace drew a colorful picture of herself wearing a pair of ice skates and yes, that is her handwriting which I embroidered in black floss.


Here's an example of how her original drawing compares to that of the finished quilt block. Some of the pictures, such as this one, required some downsizing to fit within the square.

A big thank you goes out to Meme who helped embroider some the animal blocks and assisted me with the fabric selection. To think that three generations of us took part in this project - makes this one special quilt, indeed!