a wedding present

i am big on these two things lately.  

at the beginning of this year, my brother-in-law got married to a girl from madrid! the wedding was there so all of my husband's family got to go to spain to be there, and it was such a great trip.  i will have to post some pictures when i get around to it.  anway, for my wedding present to them, i thought i'd incorporate both embroidery and maps in a "quilt"--a map felt appropriate since this was an international union.

some of my preliminary planning

i don't pretend to be a quilter.  this is actually more of a pieced blanket.  also, the pictures aren't the best because we had to take them quickly in a cramped spanish apartment while the bride and groom weren't around.

 the breakdown:

i used mostly muslin for the main parts and then pieced some nice thick cotton solids in navy and green. i  filled it with 2 layers of thin cotton batting.  to get it to spain, i put it in a vacuum bag in my suitcase.

i sewed the layers together with a chevron pattern.  it took a bit of measuring but the result was cute.  i bound the edges with a striped seersucker that i love.

also, you can barely see it in the photo above, but in the upper left hand corner of the blanket i embroidered their names and the date.

i embroidered a world map on a separate piece--this is what i worked on for most of the plane ride.  i highly recommend this project for the plane (if you can sneak the needle and tiny scissors past security like i did) because the time went by so fast.  it was relaxing and almost mind numbing.  after i finished, i ironed all the edges and then slipstitched it onto the quilt by hand.

i absolutely love how the embroidered map turned out.  i am definitely going to do this in future projects.
 if you look closely, you can see where i made little x's in both texas and madrid (their homes) and connected them with a little dashed line.  there are also x's where both of them served full-time, 2 year LDS missions (this was long before they met each other). brian's was in ukraine and noemi's was in utah.

and here is the back.

i hope they enjoy it as much as i loved making it!