29. Wedding Dress Quilt

No matter how long this entry runs, it couldn't possibly be as lengthy as the experience of making this quilt. A year or two (at least) before we moved, someone had contacted me about creating a quilt from her wedding dress. The dress itself was unusual in that it had a train made of cascading crepe and satin fabrics in autumn colors ranging from light peach through orange to deep rust, embellished with silk leaves here and there. The rest of the dress was a more typical white silk-like material. The quilt was to be the "essence of autumn", since the wedding had taken place in October. An art teacher, the client brought me a copy of the wedding invitation she had designed and drawn, featuring two swans and a pumpkin.

The initial stage of this project went smoothly enough. I suggested that we use her drawing as inspiration for a central design, surrounded by autumn leaves fashioned from the pieces of the train (along with some additional printed and sheer fabrics); all would be machine-appliqued onto the white of the wedding dress. As I write these words, it seems simple enough in concept.

Hah!

The truth is that I only completed this project after at least four years of lurching from one state of paralysis into another, with brief bursts of nerve-wracking, irreversible dress-destroying activity in between. I was almost certainly intimidated by the fact that the owner of the dress was herself an artist, and was further stymied by having designed a quilt that I didn't know how to make. I had no idea how to create the large drawing in the quilt's center, I didn't know how to work successfully with slithery, easily frayed fabrics, and I wasn't all that adept at the kind of free-motion machine work I had envisioned as the quilting on the finished piece. I like challenges, but this one nearly did me in, and I will be forever grateful that this client never, ever pressured me, showing extraordinary patience and contacting me every once in a while to see if I (and her dress) were still on the planet.

To make the very long story short, I eventually did tons of free-motion thread embroidery for the central motif, "drawing" with needle and spool after spool of thread; I stabilized sheer and slippery fabrics with a fusible web before sewing them down; and by the time I had completed all the embroidery--not to mention many other projects in the intervening years--I had accumulated enough experience to do the improvisational, free-hand quilted leaf designs on the resulting queen-sized quilt.

Would I do it again? Probably, but not on purpose. What I learned about the effect of my awesome powers of procrastination on my peace of mind was even more valuable than the new skills and techniques that this risk-taking brought about. But it is surely no way to run a business or treat a customer, and I have confined all subsequent impossibly difficult designs to the quilts I make for myself--or the patient people I love. I have even learned that some of those impossible quilts should never be completed, but that's a story for another day.