07 2 / 2012
Wedding Chuppah Quilt
For our wedding in June, I’ve asked our friends and relatives to mail us fabric with their RSVPs. Now invitations haven’t gone out yet, but I’ve gotten a bunch from people I see regularly so that I could begin already. In my mind, I need a minimum of 25 blocks, I have a goal of 36, and the most I could do without it becoming ridiculous is 64.
There are 200 invited guests and they’ve been given the prompt to “send fabric or fabrics representing yourselves -or-send a pre-made 12 inch quilt block” - if everyone does the assignment, there are 112 physical invites going out - so that means with 2 color blocks - 56ish possible - so far we’ve gotten one fabric per couple - athough I think a friend is planning to send fabric to represent each of her, her husband and her kids, which if people go that route would change things - I also am really hoping that someone sends us a quilt block because that would be pretty cool - but if they don’t I can handle it. :)
So far we’ve gotten some purchased fabric and also some clothing - a friend tried to give me a silk robe - which was pretty, but not washable. Jersey and nylon are *super* hard to work with in this context. I’ve been sure so far to match up stretchy and floaty fabrics with really stiff counterparts - but you can see from the paperpinwheel that it doesn’t always go as planned. That block is actually a little smaller than the others, I might have to border it honestly - something about the silky fabric in the middle changed when I cut and sewed it. I love a good challenge, though!
I’ve also cut the the front and back motifs off of the t-shirt in 12.5 inch squares - and then cut 12.5 inch hunks out of the fabrics that I have enough of (some I don’t or haven’t - the vintage came in pre-cut squares and the spoonflower was just the sample swatch and I used *all* of it) and hope to make the back in 12 inch blocks that line up wiht the front - which sounds crazy, but I think is doable…so that when I quilt it, the stitch in the ditch lines grid up on the back.
I’m probably going to quilt it in a grid since it’s a sampler quilt and I probably won’t have much time in the finshing stages - this is a wedding and it’s gonna be my chuppah after all - must.be.done. So I’ll stich in the ditches and then I’ll just go down the middle line at 6 inches on each square. That should hold just fine and be easy enough to do.
3 down - 22 or 33 to go! Invites go out in a few weeks, so hopefully fabric will start piling in at that point…and also my birthday party happens about a week after the invites go out, so I hope I can encourage people to bring their RSVPs with them. This seems like a good idea. I guess we’ll all find out.
Streak of Lightning with Vintage Scraps & Spoonflower Custom
My Blue Heaven with a t-shirt & some quilting fabric.
Paper Pinwheel with silky shirt & cotton fabric.
