Wedding quilt number one

I have made three wedding quilts so far.  Well two quilts given to commemorate weddings and one that I think of as a wedding quilt that one is still in my possession. This post is about the first of these quilts.

The inspriation was knowing that the bride's mother would be making made her wedding dress and the bridesmaid dresses.  Knowing she was doing so I asked her before she began not to throw away any of the material left over from the process and could I have it to make a quilt.

She readily agreed and duly snuck me a bag of material so her daughter would know nothing about it.  I already had some white satin so I was confident I could make at least a small quilt.

I was fortunate that for a while my mother worked with a gentleman who as a side line made wedding dresses.  He hated to throw away scraps but had his workroom littered with them.  He was happy to get rid of the bits knowing they would be put to good use, he later expanded so his sideline became his full time occupation.  Sadly that reduced contact and ended my free satin and silk.

Anyway back to the quilt, the bits from cutting out a dress are not uniform and did not lend themselves to any formal block pattern.  Plus I liked the idea of it being obvious that the quilt was made of bits.  So I just stitched bit after bit together, I did not plan it, just if two bits had an edge of the same length they got sewn together. It did not matter if it was lilac to white, white to white or lilac to lilac  they got sewn.

Quilts out of bits is something I like to do, although it normally takes me a long time to collect sufficient bits.  I don't call then crazy quilts as typicaly in the UK that refers to quilts which have decorative stitches done over the seams and mine don'e have that.  So made of bits = Bits-a-quilts.

Bit by bit it grew, and so did the amount of satin fibre in my home!  It got everywhere, it floated about, hitched rides on clothes, it even turned up in the freezer.

Once the middle looked big enough I added a boarder in cotton, then a border in the satin (OK so I kept some of the bigger bits back for that) then cotton again. I quilted in the furrow, fairly randomly and it was done. My friend was very happy with the finished item.  Sadly circumstances mean she no longer has the quilt and this photograph is all that remains.

Lilac and white satin wedding bits-a-quilt 

As I was quite pleased with the result, when I heard my cousin's bride was having her wedding and bridesmaid dresses made I thought I would offer to make them a quilt. She had samples of the fabric one night when I was visiting my aunt.  Her dress was to be cream and the bridesmaid's in shades of apricot.  I could envisage a beautiful quilt and made my offer.  The offer was declined, I will admit that at the wedding I was still mentally turning the dresses into quilts.