A wedding quilt for Deb and Jack
July 4, 2008
by Pam Thorton
Two years ago on July 1, 2006, my niece Deb married Jack. There were two things she wanted me to do as part of her wedding. One was to take the veil her mother, my best friend since we were 12 years old, wore at her wedding and sew sequins and seed pearls onto it to update the look. It took me four months to complete that assignment on the cathedral length veil. The second request was for me to create a “memory quilt” with messages from everyone who was invited to the wedding.
Now my niece comes from a huge family, we’re related by love, not blood, and there were over 250 people invited to the wedding. So my mission for a whole year was to create the hundreds of five inches by five inches quilt squares needed for the quilt and then hunt down the invitees at the engagement party, wedding shower and family picnics and have them each sign a quilt square. In the end there were people still signing quilt squares at the wedding reception.
Mission accomplished, well, almost
That was the easy part. As a quilter I love to create the individual squares and piece them together—the creative side. The b-o-r-i-n-g side for me is the actual putting it all together. For both tasks, I stitch by hand, a very time consuming method. The last quilt I made was for my father to take with him to the nursing home, and that took five months to finish.
So the fact that this quilt sat in my apartment for two years was no surprise, given my busy schedule and the fact that I knew months of sewing lay ahead. So it sat and sat and sat. In the meantime my niece and her husband had their first child, the amazing Jack, and are now expecting their second child this January. You can imagine the overwhelming sense of guilt I felt at not having finished their quilt. I kept saying to myself, “It’s a wedding quilt, not a marriage quilt!”
That’s when a friend of mine recommended a woman who lives in upstate New York who, for a very modest fee, will put the quilt together. She has a long-arm sewing machine that can create fancy stitches and knock out a quilt in a day. Sign me up! I sent it to her last week and it arrived back in the mail today. Wonderful!
All I have to do now is stitch down the binding, a day’s worth of work, and appliqué to the backing a label of some wedding photos I scanned on fabric. I hope to get this to them within the next week or two.
That’s the story of Deb and Jack’s quilt.
Pam Thornton is director of the Chappaqua Library. Please share any quilting tips, tricks and books with her at
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