glittergoods: wedding

Once upon a time, in the middle of planning for my sister's wedding, I decided that, much as the happy couple would probably like a new stockpot or etc, for their wedding present, instead I would make them a quilt. In their wedding colors. Sprinkled with little drawings I'd done for their wedding invitations. So that they would never ever forget ~~how hard I worked on their wedding~~ that magical day.

(A less egomaniacal version of events is that there I was, gazing lovingly at the kona cotton wall in the local fabric store for no particular reason when I suddenly realized that those particular bolts of Kaufman "berry" & "sage" were perfect matches to Paper Source's "beet" & "pool," & what would it hurt to buy a few yards each, as if enough to make yet another version of A Day at the Beach?)

The plan, as it came together, was a big field of berry over a big field of sage, divided by a wonky-angled pieced stripe made up primarily of chartruese (the third wedding color), ivory, & black (my sister's wedding dress was this incredible ivory lace thing with a black ribbon sash), backed by wide stripes of grey & my favorite Amy Butler floral.

I was going to send it out to be quilted, but I didn't feel like I was finding a quilter love match, style & schedule-wise, so I just kept putting off the decision, & you see where this is going, don't you?

Meanwhile, I was learning how to do loopy quilting, & also letting the clock tick down until the endless & paralyzing recursive loop of "I kind of want to do it but it's too scary & I don't want to mess up the wedding quilt but I want loops on it but I should just send it out to someone else but I don't want stippled tiny ducklings but I'm running out of time but I want to do it" turned into me finally taking a good look at the calendar, shutting up, buying a pair of quilting gloves, & jumping in.

It was still terrifying. Largely, I think, because the machine I was working on didn't have much in the way of throat space, & so there was a lot of quilt management that had to happen all the time. Plus, turning it around to fit the other half in the machine? Hello, backwards quilting.

But, oh, look how it turned out. I didn't know -- as a little postscript to this quilt's reign of terror, I realized that I didn't know as I was putting the finished quilt in the washing machine -- how the loops would look post-washing on a large scale, but I think it turns out that they look pretty excellent. I used an organic cotton batt, so got a nice amount of vintagey shrinkage, & the whole thing is squashy & inviting.

The screenprinted bits blend in nicely now, too. I did their names + date, the cupcake, the paper airplane from their response card (a two color print, black & silver), & the ferry boat.*

I'm so pleased with it. It's the...quiltiest quilt I've made yet, & I love most everything about it (except for some certain small parts of the quilting, you know who you are). May it keep you guys warm for many years to come, sis.

*More pictures of details in my flickr set of the quilt.

I spent much of the weekend eyeball-deep in the pictures I took at my sister's wedding, putting together slideshow cds & little photo albums to send off to various family members, & so I am finally ready to write about it (I say "finally" as if it were the longest-languishing event that I have not written about, ha).

The thing about making my sister's wedding is that it was like an excellent wedding do-over, with none of the pressure of making once-in-a-lifetime choices for myself, plus 8 years more design/craft experience on my part. My sister is not like me in many ways, & one of them is that she's not particularly visual & doesn't really fuss about the tiny details & probably thought I was just nuts (or else I was intent on making HER nuts) during a lot of the planning process, but seeing her face when she walked into her pretty, simple, whimsical reception made all the work & the fuss & the nutsiness worth it. (And don't kid yourself: those sweet simple handmade-but-polished weddings? Plenty of work.)

Way back in the fall, we set the tone with the save the date card: a little drawing, a little sparkle, a little lightheartedness.

The actual invitation was very simple in the midst of the other colorful, whimsical pieces. I know I at least posted a picture of the invites back when I was working on them, but in case I didn't mention this at the time (I see I didn't), I would like to note that the gocco ink + Paper Source Luxe paper gave me complete fits with ink bleed as the cards dried. In the end I think it was worth it, because the whole concept was beautiful textured cream paper with black ink = beautiful textured sparkly lacy ivory dress with black ribbon (as seen on my sister), & I love the variations that handprinting brings, but I ended up having to print way more than we needed to make up for the ones that were too blurry when dried (because there's variation & then there's variation). It may have just been me, but still, word to the wise if you're looking at goccoing small clean-lined text onto textured paper.

She decided to have cupcakes instead of a cake, so I designed these to go on top. The little paper airplane first showed up above, on the response cards, & since her husband is a pilot, it seemed appropriate to bring it back here & there.

I did not bake these (though I did end up bringing 3 dozen vegan cupcakes along to the reception, which possibly is a sign of that nutsiness I mentioned earlier), but I was very happy with the way the cupcake maker kept things homemade-looking.

The groom's cupcakes, made from a very particular recipe of my brother-in-law's late grandmother. He was a little worried that they wouldn't be right because his grandmother never made cupcakes; I think, in the end, he was a little too busy being freshly married to notice any difference.

Favor, program, flag. The program cover swiveled to the side on that little purple dot (tiny snap) to reveal the ceremony info printed on chartreuse card stock. I really like the clean look of the snap, but when using those babies, give yourself enough time that you're not running all over town at the last minute looking for a tool that works without ruining that smooth little dot. Ahem. Anyway, I think that they came up with a genius idea for favors, which was to get cases of customized Jones Soda. We went with the cream soda (the groom was a little disappointed that we didn't go with bright blue, but it didn't match) & tied a little favor tag around each one with ribbon in the various wedding colors.

One of my sister's friends spent a long time trying to get the bottles lined up just so. Better her than me.

The escort cards have the name handwritten on the front, table number printed on the back. I made the board from an acoustic ceiling tile: cut it to size with a box knife, stapled linen-blend fabric & some ribbon around it, then hot-glued a piece of felt to the back to cover the staples. I got the fabric on big sale at Joann, so I think all told I spent less than $10 on the board. It won't hold up as well as -- I assume -- homosote would (ours was broken by the end of the weekend), but it will do the job for table cards & has a much more substantial look than something like foamcore.

I was pretty amused by the tissue paper pom pom blog mini-craze that happened a little while ago, since at the same time we were again considering making puffs for the wedding reception (having already been through at least one cycle of consider/reject/examine-the-budget before slinking back around to the idea). I made a sample, & we got a lot more excited about it than we thought we would, plus, our budget loved the idea. We followed Martha's directions, but our largest size came from a 20"x15" sheet of paper, & the smaller was approximately half that size -- the 20"x30" we tried just looked too sloppy -- & we curved the ends for a more floral look.

It was a lot of tissue paper trimming (my mom = tissue puff hero) & fluffing but we were delighted with the finished look -- though, to be fair, it's hard to go wrong when you're having a sweet little summertime wedding reception in a room with charming white ceiling beams, hm?

All in all, I think I showed enormous restraint, only putting glitter on the save the dates (&, really, just the tiniest speck) & on the table numbers. You may recognize these as being near kin to my glitter letters, though I added floral wire to the bottom so they could stand up in the table arrangements.