My almost eternal project in Grandmother's Garden

Today I'm taking my biggest ever quilt project to the sewing group to once again start with the quilting part of it. This is a single bed size quilt (about 160 cm x 230 cm at the moment, with the framing not cut to the final size) for my daughter. We started on it together in summer 1993 when spending a week at my parents' home. She really was a little girl then, but she sewed some of the hexagons together and basted many of them on the paper templates. We used leftover pieces from my mother's stash to begin with, and at home my own. (See "Never throw anything away".) Over the years I continued on this project, mainly during the summers, and in just ten years I had put together the 2,191 little hexagons. Then I made the framing of dark blue fabric, sandwiched the top with cotton wadding and a blue extra wide bedsheet for backing with nearly a hundred safety pins and started quilting. By hand. Inside the seamline, meaning through double top layer, the cotton wadding and the thick and solid backing. No way. Not in a million years would that be possible. So I put the project to rest, again, to wait for better days to come. It only took five years.

Around new year I started thinking about the quilt again. I knew I needed a thinner backing and started looking for a suitable one. Kaija didn't want flowery patterns, I knew I didn't want plaid or stripes to emphasize how not straight the backing may end up. On Monday I decided it will be stars, and bought this:

And tonight I will take advantage of the big big tables of the school and sandwich all layers again, and maybe baste them this time. After that, I will try to use my three hours every Thursday evening in the group quilting. I made this public so I can not so easily find excuses to postpone the unevitable. I need to finish this quilt someday. I will report occasionally on the progress, if any.