Beck's Quilt

Rather than fill today's post with lots of words about this quilt, I thought I'd show y'all the finished product and then chat briefly about one particularly interesting aspect of this quilt.
First the quilt.

One of the challenges of this quilt was incorporating a request made by the mom who commissioned the quilt for her 13 year old boy. She wanted the quilt to not only feature this design, but to include 24 photos of the boy from infancy to about age 8. Add to that, she wanted me to make a legend that explained the photos.
I have to say, as a parent of teenagers, albeit girls so I could be way off base, I think it might be a few years before the quilt's intended recipient fully appreciates or even wants to display his quilt. Call me cynical, but I don't imagine there are a lot of teenage boys who want their buddies hanging out in their room, admiring a quilt that includes pictures of them as babies and toddlers. Then again, maybe these adorable photos will be a real chick magnet, so who knows? Maybe this quilt will peak out from underneath dirty socks and discarded Cliff bar wrappers.
As I mentioned, my customer provided the photos already transferred onto fabric as well as a description of each picture detailing when it was taken and who or what is included in the photo. She asked that I make a legend, transfer that legend to fabric, and applique that onto the back of the quilt. This all made a lot of sense. With a legend, anyone and everyone would know the vital statistics of the photos featured in what is essentially a memory quilt. This seemed like a reasonable request.
The difficulty lay in how to keep track of the information relating to each picture once the photo was separated from its accompanying explanation and how to actually make the legend. My first stab at solving the issue of keeping the information with its specific photo involved tearing out the part of the paper specific to the photo and pinning that to the back of the photo. The problem with that was the pins were cumbersome to work, piece and iron around. I eventually settled on affixing the torn information scrap to the back of the photo by sewing it into the 1/4" seam allowance. Then, when the top was finished I tore out the pieces, one by one, and made a note where necessary about the picture so that I could match the information to the photo once I was ready to make the legend.

To make the legend I simply crafted a chart with 9 columns and 12 rows to mimic the quilt's columns and rows and numbered the spaces that contained photographs. I then labeled the numbered space with the matching information and voila, the quilt has a legend.

 I printed the legend on to a piece of paper-backed fabric, peeled the paper off, turned under 1/4" on all four sides and appliqued the legend to the back of the quilt.
It was all so much easier than I thought it would be.
Tomorrow the quilt goes to its new home. I'm glad the legend is there to add a little more clarity about the little boy, who's not so little anymore, and his story.