Our Wedding Quilt

I have a small problem in life…I always have to be unique…or at least as unique as possible, AND I have to be as independent as possible. When I was thinking about what the guests’ could sign for the wedding in lieu of a guest book, I thought, “Why not quilt pieces and then a quilt could be made?” Luckily, my mother-in-law is a quilter and she was all for the idea. Then she made her mistake…she let me choose the shape of the pieces 🙂 As we were looking through books we saw this quilt with pieces that looked like an apple core…it couldn’t have been more perfect…or more difficult. But, my mother-in-law never complained. She had a template made, hand-dyed 66 pieces of fabric in fun colors, not too bright (which I love but wouldn’t work well for people to sign) and not too pastel (I am NOT a pastel person), ironed the fabric onto freezer paper and cut out each piece…what an amazing woman!

We put the empty pieces out with general instructions to try to avoid writing a quarter-inch from the sides…this worked pretty well. We had people sign them at the showers and the wedding to ensure the most participation as possible. We ended up with quite a few pieces but we still had some left over….I’ll show you what I did with those later on! After Diane pieced the quilt together (which wasn’t easy with all of those curves) she sent it to her sister, Barb of Quilts By Barb, to quilt.

Here is the result…. It is a fun and beautiful quilt. Everytime I look at it I feel that I find a new persons’ message that I hadn’t seen before…

Here’s a message from my best friend and maid of honor…Natalie.

A simple, but heartfelt, message from my dad…

On the blank pieces I wrote out different things, like the quote I used from the last episode of “Sex and the City”, the information about the different people standing up in our wedding, readings and gospel we had chosen for our ceremony, and dates of the bridal showers…little things like that.

In the end there were still some blank ‘apple cores’ so Barb quilted different images in each.

Just another idea to create a memory that will last forever!