An early Christmas gift

Since 2004 our friends Steve and Nancy have traveled with us for two weeks.  We have been to Alaska twice, visited 4 Canadian providences plus 8 other states.  I decided to make a "memory" quilt to highlight our travels to give as their Christmas gift this year.
I used at least one picture from each year we traveled and printed the pictures on fabric.
For the area around the "picture blocks" I used Lynn Graves' "Pineapple" foundation sheets.

There are 10 picture blocks and 10 plain blocks in the quilt.  It was easy to figure out how I wanted to quilt the picture blocks but with the plain blocks I had to put on my thinking cap to figure out the perfect design.  I decided to use my Cricut die cutter and used the 50 States cartridge to cut the 9 states.  I scanned the die cutted states into my computer and then used my Janome embroidery digitizing software to design the quilt pattern.  I then added the state name inside each state with Janome embroidery software and Monogram Wizard Plus software.
For the Canadian providences I downloaded clip art and followed the same process I used for the states.


It was a pleasure making this one of a kind gift as it enabled me to relive the adventures we had on our travels.