I have a secret guilty pleasure—
tell no one! It’s that t.v. show called
‘Say Yes to the Dress,’ about
brides and their families and friends, shopping for pricey wedding dresses.
Shows need plots, and in this one, it’s usually a power
struggle. Whether concocted by producers, or genuine, I don’t know (some say ‘reality
t.v.’ is an oxymoron), but on nearly every episode, a sister, mother, best
friend, or groom tries to force the bride to buy something that he or she
loves, but the bride does not.
When the bride does find a dress she loves, and emerges from the dressing room to show it off on the runway, the offender(s) giggle and carp: “You look like a linebacker!” “You look like
a bedspread!” or, the classic, “You look
like a hooker!” The bride scurries back to
the changing room in tears (except for that gal who wanted to look like a hooker).
In the dressing room, one of the sales associates – all skilled
psychotherapists – gives the bride a powerful pep talk,
explaining that if she’s old enough to get married, she’s old enough
to choose a dress. Meanwhile, the
manager is out by the runway, scolding the rude entourage. An invisible,
troubled-sounding male narrator ominously intones, “Will Rachel’s mom [sister/cousin
/best friend] stand in the way of her dreams?”
After a commercial break or three, everyone behaves better,
and the bride nearly always winds up with the gown she loves. In the closing moments, the now-jubilant narrator declares: “If a bride stays
true to her style, she’ll glow as she walks down the aisle,” or, “If everyone keeps an open mind, she’ll
walk down the aisle looking divine.” It often rhymes, or nearly rhymes.
Formula, yes, but in today’s troubled times, I find it soothing.
As an unrepentant quilt embellisher, I
enjoy looking at lace, tulle, silk, satin, tiaras, pearls, bows and bling.
Pretty dresses, pretty brides, pretty crazy entourages and pretty steep prices
(from $1,000 to $30,000 or more) – except for the tab, the stakes are pretty
low. So it’s relaxing to listen to The Show while I quilt, or
take coffee and chocolate breaks to watch.
Over the past several months, my whole life began to morph
an episode of The Show. That’s because
height of my addiction coincided with working on a commissioned quilt that
would also serve as a wedding canopy, called a “chuppah,” at a Jewish wedding.
This bride first wrote to me in December telling me she
wanted to collaborate in making an heirloom quilt that would serve as a canopy for her summer wedding, and then would stay in the family as a quilt for generations.
I‘ve made chuppot (the plural in Hebrew') before, but never while hooked on bridal
t.v. The next thing I knew, the edges of my daily reality
got all fuzzy, like on The Twilight Zone, and I transmogrified into the supportive
Sales Associate, while my bride became, well, The Bride. She had the hopes and dreams,
and it was my job to help her realize them.
Here are some of the lessons I learned that are as true of helping
a bride choose a wedding dress on reality television as they are of making a bride
a wedding quilt in regular old reality.
1. Start
with the visuals. Sales associates like it when brides bring in photographs
of favorite gowns. They don’t have to guess from a zillion possibilities. Similarly, my collaboration with this bride
started with images. She told me which quilts on my website she liked best. She
also told me she wanted a scene of Jerusalem in the middle, surrounded by a
Hebrew quotation. I started sketching variations and emailing them to her as
pdfs. (I sketch them on my computer - I find Coreldraw easy and intuitive). I had some Jerusalem fabric in shades of gold, and I scanned it to use it in the drafts as the Jerusalem landscape.
Ideas flew back and forth. (By the way, the Hebrew in this image and the one below is nonsense/placeholder Hebrew. Don't worry, we straightened it out by the time of the wedding!)
We soon learned that what really
needed figuring out was the border, which brought me to the next lesson…
2. More is more. In t.v.-land, some brides want it all – rhinestones,
pearls, lace, feathers, beads, ruching, fabric flowers, a train, the whole 9
yards (literally). The sales associate
has to break the news that more costs more. My bride especially admired one of the most complex
quilts on my Judaiquilt website, called ‘Invocation’.
Oh sure, what’s not to like? That particular piece is the quilty equivalent
of a gown by P’nina Tornai (designer of famously
sexy, overwrought wedding dresses. Yes, that's a see-through bodice).
Invocation isn’t sexy, doesn’t have any bodice, nor tens of thousands of sparkly jewels, but it is a bit overwrought, with a 500+ piece border,
made from dozens of different batik fabrics in shifting values, which took me,
oh, about a decade (on and off) to arrange.
So, just like a sales associate suggesting only gowns within the bride’s
budget, I tried very hard to focus my bride with sketches of MUCH less complex
borders (like, 14 pieces instead of 500).
No go. She kept choosing the more intricate
options. I reluctantly told her that, if she
really wanted that 500-piece border, I would have to raise the initial price. I held my breath, as they always do on The Show, wondering if the
bride’s family could or would pay the extra to get what they wanted. They
did. Phew!
4. Sometimes the Bride has to touch the textiles. From The Show, I learned
that there are poufy “ball gown”-style wedding dresses, which differ from
slender “mermaid gowns,” complete with tail fins – who knew? A bride who walks
into the salon wanting to look like Cinderella might, to her shock, walk (or swim) out looking like The Little Mermaid. Or vice versa. Only by
trying a dress on can she learn what she likes.
Similarly, figuring out colors and textures
for our quilt. In our early emails, my
bride told me she imagined ‘royal’ colors, like golds, silvers, coppers, and
whites. I couldn’t quite figure how that would work in cotton batiks, which I
had initially planned to use (Batiks are what give Invocation a painterly quality). If a quilter’s cotton isn’t
overprinted with metallic ink, the golds, silvers and copper become yellows,
greys and brown. So I offered alternatives. What about adding more color, in jewel
tones, like blues, purples, greens? Then
I had another idea: What if I made the quilt in silk dupionis? Then they would
have the metallic sheen! I sent her lots of snapshots of different shiny fabrics.
What a mess, right? It took me a while to realize that all these photographs
were confusing us further. A photo can
only go so far in capturing the real look, feel and hue. In desperation, I stuffed about 30 fabric swatches into an envelope, and mailed them
to her, in the good old U.S. Reality Mail. I asked her to sort them into three
piles: Love, Indifferent, and Hate.
She and her fiancé did the sorting together. When they
mailed those swatches back to me, in three marked bundles, I could never, ever have
predicted the results:
I stapled the results to three separate pieces of paper. LOVE swatches are on the left; INDIFFERENT in the Middle; and HATE on the right.
They loved many
of the blues, browns and tans. Hated all
purples and greens! They didn’t like grays (= cotton silvers). They were
indifferent to the pinks. But there were lots of exceptions, which took
me completely by surprise. They disliked several of the blues that were the exact
same hue as the blues they loved, but which had a different subtle print or batiked design. Same with the browns. Same hue, but different patterns, raised
strong feelings in them, much more than I would have predicted.
I hung the three sheets on my wall, and referred to them
frequently, making the quilt as much as possible from LOVE set, throwing in INDIFFERENTs when necessary, and no HATES, of course. This very specific information was pure gold
in terms of steering my fabric choices.