The wedding quilt - a work in progress

 

Back in the mists of time, three years ago, I got married. Because I'm a very crafty lady it was a very crafty wedding and with a lot of help from my friends we made a lot of the wedding decorations ourselves.This included collecting many colourful teapots, putting dinosaurs on sticks, arranging flowers and, most importantly of all, sewing miles and miles of bunting. Enough bunting to decorate two large function rooms, plus extra mini bunting to decorate the tables.

 

My beautiful friends making the bunting look good.

Teapots and dinosaurs on sticks (can you spot him?)

 I chose a selection of fabrics that would match with the colour theme of the wedding (red and white unless you hadn't guessed) along with two fabrics that were meant to represent me and my husband - a polka-dot ladybird fabric and a dinosaur-patterned fabric. I even ended up making us a ring pillow for the ceremony from the same selection of fabrics.

Our ring pillow, taken just before the ceremony.

On the day we gave away lots of the decorations as wedding favours, including lots of teapots, tea-caddies and teacups, but we were left with the miles and miles of bunting which we weren't entirely sure what to do with.That's when I came up with an over-ambitious plan. I decided that I would make a memory quilt from all the bunting flags. I worked out that I could cut the flags into equilateral triangles and arrange them in a patchwork hexagonal grid. I drew up my plan and set to work, and then, well, then lots of other things happened.

My diagram for the wedding quilt

 

Turning the flags into triangles with equal sides

 

I make good progress with the first few rows of triangles

Firstly I should say that this was my first ever quilting project, and wow did I really throw myself in the deep end. I will go on the record now to say that I would not recommend teaching yourself patchwork as you go along with a hexagonal-grid quilt rather than traditional squares. I managed to make the job even more difficult for myself my using a variety of fabrics, some of which turned out to be very unsuitable for machine sewing (I'm looking at you polka-dots!)

We also moved to a different part of the country a few months later, so the quilt and all the remaining fabric pieces were packed away and, I'm sorry to say, have been sitting rather forlornly in a bag in the corner of my sewing room ever since.

The wedding quilt as it is now

So this is the quilt at the moment. I only need to add two more rows of triangles to the bottom in order to finish the patchwork, but because it's so wide that's 60 triangles to be added. I also would like to add some applique to the centre of the large star to represent the wedding day once the patchwork is finished. I had started adding some embellishments to the centre of the smaller blue stars, but I will have to think about what else to include and where.

A dinosaur star with an owl in the middle. It sums up the wedding day surprisingly well

I recently inherited some fabric that should work perfectly as a backing for the quilt. I don't have any wadding yet, or any experience quilting through many layers of fabric, but I've got this far and I'm determined to learn what I need to finish it! So here is my plan. As of May I'm going to be on maternity leave, but although I'll no longer be running a craft business I'm certain I won't be able to keep my hands still or my sewing machine quiet. While I'm waiting for the baby to arrive, and possibly after the big day to prevent myself for going stir-crazy, I'm going to work on the quilt and get it finished.

Once Lucky Ladybird Craft is on hold (9th May, last orders taken 6th May) I'll still continue to post here and maintain this blog, so keep an eye out for more updates in 2015.

Wish me luck!

LL xx