a wedding quilt: the beginnings

Hi Everyone! Sorry, I didn't mean to leave you all hanging like that for a whole week. I had big plans of popping in here on Wednesday last week to at least let you know that I was going to be away. But then, I just had one of those days where I was trying to do far too much in far too little time (leading to me literally starting to make a wedding card five minutes before we were walking out the door to the aiport. I am completely serious).

So yeah, we were at a wedding. One of my best friends' weddings, in fact. It was lovely. It was fun, crazy, stressful, beautiful, and about a million other things, all wrapped up into a four day trip. I have about a million photos to share, and they are slowly being uploaded into this flickr set, but in the meantime I want to tell you about the wedding present. Because this blog is in fact supposed to have at least some craft content, and it has been quite a while since I've shared any of that with you. There has been a good deal of behind-the-scenes craftiness going on, including one big project that I can't share just yet. But this one, I can share. It's still very much in progress, but you don't mind, do you?

Since Liz is one of my best friends, I knew I wanted to make her and Tony something really really special for their wedding present. For some reason, it seemed obvious that the something really special would be a quilt. Isn't that just what you make people for their wedding? I don't know, but I knew that's what I wanted to do. I wasn't quite sure what pattern I would use, not being a very experienced quilter. After a little bit of thought, I decided to go with a more simple quilt top pattern, but to hand-quilt it. Most people thought I was insane for suggesting that, I think because it was April and they thought I was planning on finishing it by the July 12 wedding (I wasn't planning on finishing it by the wedding, and I obviously didn't). Around the time I was making plans for this, I came across this pattern on the Purl Bee, aptly named "The Wedding Quilt." It was perfect.

In addition to getting married this summer, and preparing to start law school in the fall, Liz and Tony just moved across the country from San Francisco to Tony's home state of Maine. I feel kind of lucky that I didn't have to worry about matching the colors of the quilt to their bedroom, since they didn't even have a bedroom when I chose the colors. Now they'll just have to design their bedroom around the quilt! I chose a chocolate brown Kona Cotton for the base color with a gradient of blue to yellow to green for the zig-zag color pattern. Once I decided on the color scheme, I realized that I really didn't have as much of a variety of fabric in my stash as I thought I did. I mean, don't get me wrong, I have a pretty big stash, but I guess it's lacking in some key color areas. I guess I'll have to keep that in mind for future fabric purchases. I'm not yet sure what I'll choose for the back, maybe a medium blue? And I think I'll do some kind of blue or green (or combination of the two) for the binding. I really like this color combination and I think it's perfect for them.

The pattern is very easy to make- it's basically just a series of rectangles that you sew into strips, and sew the strips together. So far I've finished making all of the strips and have sewn 1/3 of them together. I'm hoping to have the quilt top finished in the next week or so. Even though the wedding was last weekend, I'm not feeling uber rushed to get this done (I have a year, right?). But I don't want it to drag on too long, especially since I'm feeling really energized about this project right now, I figure I should capitalize on that energy before I lose steam.

So my goal is to have it finished by the time it's cold enough to need a quilt. That's totally do-able, right? I know that hand-quilting takes a long time, but I think I can do it in a couple of months. Although this may require re-starting our Netflix subscription, which we had temporarily put on hold, after not watching a single movie for over three months. Also, I just told Liz that I'd have it done by the time they needed it, and she was so excited about that, she said they wouldn't buy another comforter. I guess I kind of have to stick to my word then, huh?