Plaid-ish Wedding Quilts

Shortly after announcing their engagement, my son and his fiancée asked if I would consider making quilts for their attendants. As recipients of quilts themselves over the years, and subjected to many displays of new quilts as they were being made or just completed, they know my passion and the joy it brings, for the entire process of making a quilt.

Wedding Plaidish Quilts on the clothesline

These are wedding quilts hanging on the clothesline in our back yard, where the wedding was held this past weekend. The beautiful bride made her entrance through the quilts.

We selected the quilt design "Plaid-ish" from Kitchen Table Quilting. There are five quilts - they had two attendants each, and one for the bride & groom.

There is Scots heritage on both the bride and groom families, so the quilt pattern seemed a perfect fit.

Plaid-ish test quilt

Being a tester of process for much of my career, I created a “proof of concept” quilt to be sure I understood how the quilt was pieced and to find efficiencies to make multiple quilts. I was very happy with the result so forged ahead with the making of wedding quilts.

I honoured the spirit of the Covid-19 pandemic, and shopped only from my personal stash of quilt fabrics (which the kids have both helped pack and carry too many, too-heavy boxes, when we moved last spring).

I selected my very favourite blues, greens, and warm autumn colours. The design relies on careful placement of colour into groups of dark, medium and light. Sorting the fabrics into these groups is tricky, as a fabric can look light next to a dark but medium next to a light – what surrounds the fabric can change how it appears!

Each quilt is made up of 3 different size blocks; with 20 blocks that are 10” x 10”, 12 blocks that are 8” x 8” and 31 blocks that are 8” x 10”. Each quilt finishes at about 64” x 82”. There are 63 blocks with 9 pieces each for a total of 567 pieces of fabric per quilt. Making 5 quilts, that is 100 of the first block, 60 of the second block and 155 of the third block; a total of 2,835 pieces.

The couple did not know that there was a quilt being made for them, to complete the set of wedding quilts. They saw the quilts as they were being made but did not see the five together until presented just before the wedding.

In the spring, one of my quilting besties spent the day with me (first vaccines in our arms, working 6’ apart, socially distancing) and we had a huge quilting session where we got a lot of cutting and sewing done. For the most of the time I spent working on the quilts, the cutting and sewing was done while longarm quilting was also getting done on client quilts.

The quilting designs are all different – the four attendant quilts are all a variation of a digital plaid. The design on the bride & groom's is “Diamonds are Forever”. The quilting thread is “Dijon”, which happens to work well with a variety of fabrics whether they are dark or light, a great blender for many fabrics. Plus, the bride loves mustard!

My longarm quilting machine counts stitches as it is working and I keep track of these. These five quilts were stitched with 507,656 stitches on the longarm. (The stitch count of the piecing is not something I can track – a different machine is used.)