This is a quilt with a story.  My grandmother was a very lucky woman who lived most of her life with no major medical problems.  She took no medicine and up until the last year of her life she walked on her own.  A remarkable feat for a 96 year old woman.  In July 2009 her body started to give out and she spent 3 long weeks in hospice.  My mother was spending her days with my grandmother at the hospice home and her evenings at my grandmother's apartment. It was difficult time for her watching her mother wither away.   On her 79th birthday she was driving back from hospice to the apartment when she rear-ended another car. Then my brother and sister (who lived within driving distance) canceled dinner plans with her. One very crappy birthday. 

My mother had plane reservations to visit me about a week and a half later but told me she was going to changed them to a later date because she would need time to clean out my grandmother's apartment.  I decided that I wanted to give her something extra special for her birthday and had just enough time to make a fast quilt for her. And I would have until she decided not to change her plans and show up as originally planned. I had to quickly zig-zag the binding in order to get it done before she arrived.   Whew!  She loved it of course. I told her that anytime she was depressed that she should wrap herself in the quilt because all those sunflowers are bound to make her smile. :o)

I suffered a very bad tendinitis episode after I made this quilt and finally realized the problem was the machine quilting.   I will probably always have to send out my quilts for quilting or else borrow a long-arm quilter.  I have find too much joy in creating quilt-tops to give it up.