Family Quilt: The Wedding Square

Another embroidered quilt square finished, woohoo! 

If you missed my initial family quilt post, the main idea behind the quilt was that in the colder months I am more apt to pick up my embroidery and work on a random project. The thing was, I had no use for the embroidery when it was done. I just did it to practice and keep myself busy when I had free time. So, instead of making a bunch of projects that had no use, I decided to start embroidering on a standard sized square and when I acquired enough of them, I will put them together into a quilt. I chose to do a family theme and so the finished quilt will tell a story of our family and hopefully some special things about us. 

The square I finished recently was a remembrance of the day Chet and I were married. Lily was 4 and the sweetest little flower girl. We chose basic black and white with a bit of bright summery greens for our formal picnic style wedding. I really enjoyed the day, we got married in a local rose garden where Chet's parents had been married and spent the afternoon/evening/night (the reception kept rocking from 3pm - after midnight!) eating and dancing to the music of a local DJ that does amazing scratching. I actually had to close the party up so me and Mr. Crawford could get back to the hotel before we were exhausted. 

The wedding was awesome though, a great day with good friends and family. 

I found this pretty border online and I liked that it had three bluebirds. I felt it was a good representation of Chet, Lily, and I becoming a family. To broaden my horizon a little, I grabbed my copy of the book "Colorful Stitchery" by Kristen Nicholas and practiced the stem stitch for the branches rather than using my go to backstitch. I'd like to challenge myself to learn a new stitch with each project, just to keep things fresh and fun. 

I hand sketched "The Crawfords" in the center and then put a small est.2011 underneath to note the year. It has a bit of a whimsical touch. I love the way the leaves and berries kind of meander around the words rather than it being a structured border. 

The next embroidery square I picked out is based on our all time favorite holiday- Earth Day! This is Lily's doing. The girl just HAD to decorate for the holiday last year and talks about it like it's her birthday when she's waiting for it to come. Last year we created a banner of tiny paper earths to string up around the house and then used the old crayon pieces to make little earth crayons. I found a fun embroidery of the earth and thought it needed to be a part of our story.  With Earth Day coming up soon (April 22nd), I thought I could get a jump on the festivities this year.