Family Tree Quilt

Several months ago I was talking to my sister in law who pointed out to me that my mother in law was going to be 60 in July. She had come up with an awesome idea to make a scrapbook for mom and have everyone make a page or pages on their favorite memories with Grandma. While she was telling me about the scrapbook I started thinking about quilts. My MIL is the one who taught me how to do pieced quilts and she has helped me make one for each of my girls when they are born. I thought it would be fun to make her a quilt using the kids hand prints. At first I was thinking of something simple like each child use a square of fabric and put their hand print on using paint. While I was thinking about what I wanted to do I realized that my mom was turning 50 in July as well. I started talking to my sister, who was an art major and my simple quilt idea quickly turned into "lets make a family tree quilt!" I thought it sounded awesome so I started perusing google and pinterest looking for ideas. I found several that were very nice, but not quite what I had in mind. I wanted the hands touching its 'branch' with each family group one one branch. Mostly I needed some way to quilt it. I didn't want to tie it, there was already so much visually, but I don't know how to freehand quilt, so I needed some sort of pattern to the background so that I could quilt it using the lines that were already there. Since I couldn't find exactly what I wanted I decided to just make up the whole design from scratch. I got out some paper and a calculator and got to work. I wanted the quilts to be a picture of their family on that birthday so I had all the ladies send me traced hand prints of everyone in their little family. My MIL is who I always ask quilting/sewing questions to and it was so hard to have to just figure it out! Also, just keeping the secret! My mom knew we were going to do something for birthdays. Her's, my dad's and my nephew all have birthdays in July so we were planning to celebrate when we got together at the beginning of the month for a family reunion. My MIL did not even know we were planning to celebrate her birthday. Almost all of Marcus' family got together last week for a couple of events. We kept telling Grandma that we were together to celebrate those event and we weren't going to do anything for her birthday. At the end of the trip we threw a surprise party for Grandma! Hopefully she didn't want to kill any of us for our evil planning :)

Gma Laurie opening her quilt.

Both quilts were basically the same.  The only difference was the colors used for the hands/border/birds.

Gma Ann's quilt and the kids all finding their hand on it.