Finally A Quilt Finish & The Story of This Quilt

 Good morning Sunday everyone,
     One of my goals in 2017 was to get the binding hand sewn on to this quilt-I did get half finished but then quit as spinning was more fun and less painful for my left hand.
     I have kept this out too in plain sight to remind me lol.  I stuck to it this past week and finished it last night. What a relief and so thrilled with this particular finish.
    This is really embarrassing but this quilt has gone through allot to get finished. I really need to make a label for this one.
    This quilt had to have been started around 2006 or earlier. Originally my Mom was going through physical therapy after her shoulder surgery and living out on her farm she needed help getting there. So her cousin and cousin's husband drove her twice a week. They would not take gas money or any money for helping her, so Mom instead told her cousin she would help her with colors for her next quilt. My Mom always had excellent color sense and her cousin not so much.  
   I fell in love with the quilt top when it was finished and for a gift Mom's cousin gave it to me. My Mom was quite surprised lol
  A few years before all of this her cousin had taught me how to hand quilt so I was planning on hand quilting this lovely quilt.

  Fast forward to what I am guessing is around 2008 my neighbor had been looking for a long arm so she could quilt her own quilts. Hubs found a super good deal on a commercial gammill long arm and it came with lots and lots of organic cotton batting. Turns out this organic cotton came from a Texas coop and was quite old-but stored well. It was called cotton leaves and is what our ancestors would have quilted with. The cotton was rolled in layers in these huge rolls and then you just peeled off layers and set them in your quilt layers.
   I found out the hard way this was very difficult to work with and needed close rows of stitching. I made two baby size quilts with it and loved it, but when I set up this quilt top with it and hand basted the layers together- twice-I just kept getting the cotton batting too thick to stitch either by hand or by machine-so of course I was very frustrated by this point.

   Then a few years ago I did a trade with a blog friend that needed a painted sky for her quilt she was making and in trade she quilted my quilt top with a modern day cotton batting.

Long story for a quilt lol

I needed to go into my old Photobucket account to find some photos

The cotton batting

One of the baby quilts

 Me and neighbor friend finished with the basting  Normally this would take just an hour or two but this took most of the day-that should have given me the clue that something was wrong with the thickness of the layers. That is me on the right-and I am soooo much older now lol

The finish yeah!!  I have always loved the colors in this quilt. My Mom had chosen all the fabrics for each block and this was something very different for my Mom's cousin to make.
   This is also a remembrance quilt for me-my Mom is no longer with us, my friend's husband passed on from cancer soon after this above photo, and my Mom's cousin's husband passed suddenly from a massive heart attack just weeks after he retired. So, this will be a loved and cherished quilt.