My Big Jewish Quilted Wedding Canopy

You get a call asking if you can do an assignment that would normally take nine months. It sounds like a great gig, and you're excited. So when's the deadline? 

Two months. Uh oh.

That's how I felt when an imminent bride contacted me after seeing the sushi chuppah (wedding canopy) on my Judaiquilt website. She wanted something like it, including sushi fabric; a shining gold star in the middle; and fabrics related to herself, her fiance, and their children's many activities and passions. They will have a sunset beach wedding. 

It was a dream commission. But the timing was tight - the call was in early June and the wedding's in mid-August! That sushi chuppah had taken me maybe nine months! 

Yet the more she told me about her fiance and herself and their children, the more I fell in love with her and the possibilities. Their avocations and passion ran the gamut from country music to Chanukah to tequila to skiing.  

So I said "yes." Then I sent her directly to equilter.com (no financial affiliation). It's not that equilter has the best fabrics or prices - they're comparable to other high-quality quilt fabric sites - but equilter organizes the novelty fabrics better, by topic, which is ideal if you're making a quilts representing someone's interests. She gave me a long list of favorite fabrics from the site. 

She also gave me a sense of  favorite colors - teal and pink, cream and gold - and I used those to send her images of fabrics from my LQS or my stash that might work for the central circle. 

With her approval on most fabrics, I constructed the central medallion. I created strip sets, then used a Marilyn Doheney 9 degree wedge-shaped ruler. Here's the view from the back. I often find I like the back as much as the front! 

I set the circle in the middle of the chuppah, against a sunset fabric, and the novelty fabrics in rectangles in the borders around the center. Without further ado, here is the finished quilt. It's about 63" square. 

Below is the center of the circle. The central star is gold lame - it's surrounded by floating seashells. That's on top of musical note fabric, followed by sushi fabric, and followed by a whole constellation of fabrics evocative of  beach, ocean, and sky/stars. There are 14 fabric in all in this circle (and about 55 in the entire quilt.)

Here are some of the novelty fabrics in the borders. Below, cowboy hat fabric with fabric transferred  photos of the bride and groom (I blurred them in this photo for privacy purposes) along with travel fabric,  Chanukah and Rosh Hashana fabric: 

Next, record albums, crackers, Hostess cupcakes, fortune cookies, New York style pretzels: 

Motorboating (with an appliqued photo of the family in kayaks), beach with an appliqued country music star's photo (that's Kenny Chesney, in his blue rocking chair), donuts:

Winter sports, light house,

 Same country music star, guitars:

Salad, s'mores, bagels, donuts, tequila....

(And yes, they asked for shrimp on their chuppah. Who am I to argue?)

Grilled cheese sandwiches, black-and-white cookies, hot peppers, record albums (remember those?) I added the pomegranates as a symbol of fertility and Torah. (To counterbalance the shrimp). 

Pets, football, lacrosse, soccer.

Each corner had fans made from leftover wedges from the central strip set, and in the lower right corner I put a phototransfer of the wedding invitation. 

The back features bigger pieces of the novelty fabrics for people to enjoy. 

I put the label on the lower left corner, on one of the strip sets that made up the central medallion. 

I had a wonderful time, worked night and day, and finished early! It was a joyful collaboration with a delightful client and fun fabrics, and I loved every minute of it! 

(To see more of my chuppot, go here.)

Beautiful Flying Citrus Kimono Life

I lived in Tokyo in for about a year and a half, and one of the great pleasures was the Japanese English, used as decoration, on garments, accessories, and advertising. It was inventive, earnest, wacky, and often poetic. I particularly enjoyed the corporation whose slogan was: "For Beautiful Human Life." Wow. That just sums everything up.

Another great pleasure of Japan was the extraordinary design and pattern, everywhere - on subway posters, billboards, magazines, and, of course, traditional items like paper, dishes, and textiles. This was before I was a quilter; I'd spend hours in paper shops, thoroughly grooving on each piece. Years later, after I became a quilter, I naturally began to collect Japanese fabrics 

But this particular quilt didn't start out Japanese, at all.  I'm not sure what I was thinking when I combined a trendy daisy print with a Jetson-esque heavy linen fabric featuring 1950s boomerang shapes, with, heaven help me,  grapefruit, pomegranate and grape fabric. I think I was looking at COLORS! And sewing strips together! It was some kind of therapy! I dunno?! 

After I acquired a Marilyn Doheney wedge-shaped ruler, well, no strip set was safe - I cut wedges on a slant, and next thing you know, I had this:  

                               

Mandala, medallion, whatever, as you can well imagine, it  sat in my UFO cupboard for a long time. Every now and then I'd pull it out and ponder. I really don't know what someone slipped into my coffee the day I decided that the medallion looked really great next to a swatch of kimono fabric. 

 It took me many more years of putting the thing away, pulling it out, potchke-ing around with it, putting it away, etc. before I came up with the striped background, the purple daisies...

...but wait, there's more! I took a class with Ricky Tims, and had a class leftover, which went on the lower left side - it looks like light coming in through windows. The painted fabric, inspired by a Sherrill Kahn book exercise, wound up on the lower right, and of course, the whole thing need three improvisational stars along the bottom. 

 

So here's what we have! Looking at it gives me a bit of a headache, but fortunately, my spouse loves it, and hung it in his new office.

 I hope it gives him a beautiful human office life.