This is a REAL Grandmother's Flower Garden quilt because my husband's grandmother hand pieced all the hexagons together. Each hexagon is about 1 inch long (I haven't actually measured) and there are 75 of the 'flowers' that make up the lap quilt.
His grandmother (who I met once or twice before she died) hand pieced the whole top, the flowers with the green hexagons, but then stopped there. Her only daughter (my husband's aunt) had the top and showed it to me one visit a few years ago when she found out I liked quilting. She does a lot of sewing, but not quilting. I told her that I would love to finish it - it is just too beautiful and grandma put way too much work into it to just have it sit in a box somewhere! I don't know if you can tell, but she fussy-cut each and every flower print so that the exact flower she wanted would be in the center of the hexagon!
Of course with something like this, it just has to be hand quilted. So I made sure to tell Aunt H. that I wouldn't promise it would be done quickly! First I decided to applique the quilt top to borders (yellow on the right) because I didn't want to think about binding something around all the edges of the hexagons!
Now I'm doing the hand-quilting, which isn't what I usually choose for my quilts, but it's a nice thing to do in the evening or when chatting with visiting family. I had to take many months off though when I was pregnant (because I couldn't comfortably hold my hand frame!) and when my baby was younger (because I and my house seemed to be constantly covered in spit up and I really, really didn't want anything bad to get on this quilt!)
So now I'm back to it. Slowly... 19 of 75 flowers quilted. Not sure yet what I'm doing beyond that, but I imagine I have a while to figure it out.
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