Friday, October 28, 2011

A wedding quilt

Just a note... if your name is Jennifer and you're getting married this weekend, click elsewhere or risk spoiling the surprise!

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I have a friend getting married, and I wanted to make a quilt for her as a remembrance of the event. I've been blessed to help with some of the planning, and it's been a lot of fun.  I've learned a lot about wedding traditions in the Jewish culture!  It's always fun to learn new things I think.

At the ceremony, they will get married under a huppah, which is a canopy.  Both paternal grandfathers prayer shawls (tallit) will be draped on the canopy.  They don't get to keep the tallit, so my idea was to create a quilt that would capture them together signifying the union of the two families.

And I had never seen one, so I was utterly fascinated.  I snapped these pictures and put them together into an inspiration board:

The angel charm has special significance for her, and so I wanted it to be included on the quilt as well.
Here's my palette I chose.  
And my initial sketch.  Sorry the edges of the paper aren't showing up on the scan....

Then I stuck fabric to the sketch to decide what color went where, and got to it.

I tacked the inspiration and the sketch above my sewing machine.

The piecing went rather quickly.  I wasn't trying to exactly reproduce the tallit;  I just wanted to create a piece that reminded them of the tallit together at their wedding.
The angel I did in freehand embroidery.  Here's my chalk drawing.

And here's the stitched piece.

All in all, I'm thrilled with how this turned out!


I put their names into it and the wedding date.  (The names are across the diagonal of the picture)

I was able to add some interesting machine quilting to add detail to the tallits.


 I enjoyed this project so much!

Linking up to Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival.  Click on over and check out some of the other entries!

17 comments:

  1. Oh so lovely! Love the inspiration board, but the free hand angel is just amazing! Just beautiful!!

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  2. What a very special gift,... they are definitely going to love it!

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  3. What a beautiful and thoughtful gift!

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  4. What a wonderfully creative wedding gift. A lot of thought has been put into this lovely art piece.

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  5. Very interesting. Great idea and implementation! I'm sure they were thrilled!

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  6. What an amazing effort! With beautiful results! The WIP is fascinating!!!!

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  7. Lovely gift!

    Thanks for sharing. :)

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  8. What a marvelously beautiful gift for your friend and her husband. Just wonderful. The inspiration pieces are fantastic. Thanks so much for sharing a lovely quilt with a sweet story. Have a great day

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  9. A wonderful design and what a fantastic and personal quilt. They are going to love it forever.

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  10. What a great gift. Truly a treasure.

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  11. It was really interesting to read your design process. I like the end result. Your quilt looks great.

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  12. what a great inspiration to use for your design. you did well with it, too :)

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  13. I'm sure this is going to be a gift that they will treasure for years to come. So thoughtful! =)

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  14. What a special gift. Thank you for sharing the process, and the lovely finished quilt.

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  15. Beautiful quilt...thanks for sharing.

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