A reason to celebrate

This is a photo of my parents on June 18, 1960. Aren't they everything newlyweds should be? We are getting the whole family together this weekend to celebrate their golden anniversary, now that school is out. We are spending the weekend at our little vacation home in the Poconos of Pennsylvania, where we will laugh, swim, play, eat, drink, celebrate and reconnect with each other.

Of course, my siblings and I have been hard at work behind the scenes trying to come up with original, fun, and meaningful gifts to give our wonderful parents. One of the things we did was type up as many memories as we could think of and put them in a jar. We will call it "A year of memories" and they can pull one out every day for the next year and read it and reminisce together.

We also decided it would be nice to have a family tree hung somewhere, and I offered to make a quilt. Here it is! I've been hard at work on it and have been unable to post it due to the surprise factor (they are already out there and disconnected from the long arm of the web!) but now that the weekend is here, I feel safe posting it.

The lower half of the quilt

A detail from the top of the tree

Here is our branch of the family tree. I had to practice the leaf free-motion quilting on paper before I did it with thread. There are lots of slip-ups that hopefully nobody will notice!

And here is the label on the back of the quilt.

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad! Here's to the next 50 years! (We will be away next week so I won't be posting for a while, but I'll take lots of photos to share when I get back...)