The Wedding Quilt

 

In the summer of 2011 my Mom married a man she had been with for 15 years. If you ask me, that’s real commitment!

I had thought about doing some quilting – just to try it out, and had always loved this pattern on the Purl Bee website. It all came together – a handmade gift that matched the couple’s personalities, and being 2 middle aged people they already had a toaster and a blender. Using the pattern as inspiration, I decided to make it in a large enough size to cover their bed.

The first challenge was to find the 52 different colour/pattern fabrics for the wedge pieces. I tried to use as much from my stash as possible, then hit nearly every fabric store in town to fill in the gaps. To aid in organizing the project, I got super nerdy and made this scale drawing/swatch card to bring shopping and keep things in order. I coloured in the wedges as close as possible to the similar Purl Bee version. As I found the fabrics I added them to the chart, and sometimes switched them around as others were added. It really came in handy!

 

The larger white pieces were made of cotton sheeting, and the back and binding is white on white quilting cotton. Sewing with layers of white was a little frustrating and makes you paranoid. The quilt itself was so large that I had to work on the living room floor, on one quarter at a time.

Since the central pieces were all the same, and fairly large, the front of the quilt came together fairly quickly and I intended to give this as a wedding gift. Unfortunately it was put on the back burner due to the construction of a custom kilt for the groom (obviously took priority!). I decided that it would be a first anniversary gift instead.

The next year was busy, but I managed to hand quilt a large portion of the piece, before getting swamped with other things. July rolled around and I had not had time to work on it in months. With a fringe show and impromptu moving apartments, the quilt sat 3/4 stitched until, in the lead up to xmas this year I finally pulled it out and finished it! The back of the quilt has hand painted designs by me and my 3 siblings – all referencing my Mom and John, and the date of their wedding.

Wrapping was a bit of a challenge, but I finally managed to fold it to fit a box I had saved for the purpose and cleverly hid the colour wheel, with only the centre of the quilt showing.

 Overall I was happy with the finished product. I was really happy to finally give it to two people I know will appreciate it for years to come!

Love Heather