Over the last 6 months, Claire and I have been working on a secret project….a Christmas gift for her mom, Liz.

It all started out at our last guild quilt show where Liz picked out a panel that she liked and asked Claire if she could make a quilt from it. She then asked if she needed to buy some other fabrics to add to it and Claire uttered the immortal words….”No Mom, Mrs. Frances has plenty!!”. She speaks truth!!

We started on the project when school was out last June, planning to get it finished pretty quickly, but life was just too busy for both of us so it took a few months to do.

The first step was to pick out a bunch of fabrics that would work with the panel…..

After cutting out the blocks from the panel, we added borders to each of them and planned a basic layout (that we “sort of” stuck to)…..

Now it was time to start filling in all of the blank spaces between the blocks, starting with a string of fish…..

….followed by more fish…..

….then some paper pieced umbrellas……

Like me, Claire is NOT a fan of paper piecing.

We then started using bigger pieces of fabric to fill in, piecing 9-patches, strips of squares and adding lots of borders…..

We kept adding bits and pieces and finished the top construction just after Thanksgiving. Claire basted it using fusible batting…..

….and started with the quilting…….

She did all of the straight lines and I came back and added a bit of free-motion quilting.

There were smiles galore as we looked at it one last time…..

….before packing it a big box with ribbons and bows. Liz was presented with it on Saturday and is looking forward to keeping warm under her special quilt “Dreaming of Beaches” by Claire!!!

Now we have to come up with a new project to work on in 2020. I can’t wait to spend more time with this wonderful young lady!!!