A few years ago, my mother's family celebrated a 40th annual family reunion. Many of us were to gather from far and wide to have a big celebration. One of the 'activities for the event was to have a table decorating contest. Each family was to decorate their own space in honor of the reunion. My mother decided that she wanted to go all out for the competition. After some brainstorming she/we came up with the idea to do a 'tablecloth' made up of family photos.
Being very resourceful, she figured out what was needed to print photos onto fabric. She did everything from selecting and scanning the photos to sizing them and printing them out.
So.... I ended up with a ream (literally a ream) of family photos printed on fabric. I had to sort them into piles by family and choose an equitable distribution of family members.
Some of the spuds
Yours truly putting the roof on.
She then went and picked out fabric. Her first choice was the cream colored fabric. It has a small green and cranberry print on it. That choice lead to the green and the cranberry prints. It was too much like Christmas.
Spud 3 and I went to the fabric store to pick out something else. While I was dithering between green and red prints and red and green prints and cream and green, Spud 3 walked over to the shelf, pulled out the brown and said "Here. Use this!" I'm not sure if he really thought about it or just grabbed something to shorten his fabric store ordeal. Regardless, it was the right choice. To be perfectly honest, Spud 3 has an excellent eye and is typically the final arbiter of color and placement decisions.
But then what? My husband cut 3.5 inch strips of all of the fabrics. I used those to frame the pictures I'd selected.
Ok... framed pictures of completely RANDOM sizes. Now what?
As the deadline approached, I just started sewing pieces together until I would get them close in size. Then I sewed those into strips and finally put the strips together. It sounds so simple in the re-telling. Believe me, it was a bit more stressful than that. Every time I thought I had a row or section balanced, I would discover that there were too many browns touching or no red at all and would have to re-arrange again. 
The final arrangement needed a border. I added the simple pieced red and green. We had the top finished in time for the reunion but I had to wait to find some one to quilt it. This is one of the very first quilts that I ever did that was large and quilted. Everything else was either tied or small and hand quilted. The quilting was done by the ladies at Blessings Quilt Shop.
The details... The quilt is approximately 42 x 68 inches. It is made of quilters cotton and printable fabric. The batting is cotton and it is professionally machine quilted.
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