When Time Goes By

I have had a great time creating this quilt (and a very bad experience too, but wait...). The three photos show three couples on their wedding day, each one in a different decade:

1) I can only guess who it shows: my late father's cousin and her husband. She was much older than my father.

2) my parents, they got married in 1953.

3) me and my husband, we got married in 1975.

I scanned and digitally altered the photos and printed them on cotton. I digitally designed the clock face fabric (I scanned a stenciled clock face and played with it in a photo-editing software) and printed it also on cotton. The piece is machine pieced and machine quilted.

After quilting, but before finishing I encountered a huge problem: I ironed the piece once again ... and screamed out loud: both of the inkjet printed fabrics (the beige ones with the clock faces) got stained and had yellowish stripes. My first thought was the steam of the iron, but 1) I had ironed them several times before and 2) the photos have been printed the same way on the same fabric with the same printer and they were not damaged. A mystery ... and I am still trying to figure out what exactly happened. Somebody told me it could have been the glue of the adhesive batting I used. Maybe... Anyway, due to the adhesive batting, it was not possible to separate the stained pieces from the top. (btw: I was so angry that I forgot to take a photo of the stained fabric) To save the quilt, I printed the fabric again (and let it dry for 24 hrs before ironing LOL), fused it to the stained fabric (very courageous step...) and secured it with visible machine stitches.