Heirloom Memory Quilt

This quilt was made for my cousin and has quite a bit of a back story. In 2009, this cousin got engaged. Her future mother-in-law was a quilter so she sent each household on our side of the family an 18" square of muslin and told us to make a quilt square out of it. She was planning on making a surprise gift quilt for the new couple. None of my family, including me, knew anything at all about quilting so we did various things such as iron-ons and applique. Each square represented our families and what we liked or our interests. 6 months after the marriage (and no word of the quilt), I asked my cousin about it and she said that the mother-in-law indeed made them a quilt but did not include any of our squares because they "weren't done right". They were given back to her in a plastic shopping bag. Cousin had felt so badly about it that she didn't tell us until I asked. Fast forward to 2018, I asked my cousin if she still had those squares in a bag because now I had a little bit of quilting experience and had the courage to tackle the project. These are the 9 squares she gave me. Most have permanent wrinkles from the years of storage and the iron-ons were delicate. I purposely did minimal stitching on the squares to perserve their integrity. The one in the middle bottom was starting to flake off so I decided to focus on the border and not handle it too much through the machine. (my first ever piano-key border, which I totally loved doing) I grew to love this quilt and I hope she does as well. In all the names/families represented on the quilt, 6 of them have since passed away. I think this will be a treasure to her. Hindsight lessons: 1. the muslin was very soft and thin so I wish I would have backed the squares with a stabilizer because as you can see, they have a bit of gaps. 2. I would have done a quilt-as-you go method so that I could have more stitching on each square without the worry of all the handling of pushing the quilt through the throat of my machine. Overall I do love it. Thanks for reading