Helen & Jay Got Married

I haven't been posting much lately because my summer has been CRAZY, but I have a few special projects I wanted to share with you so I will try to get caught up! First of all CONGRATULATIONS HELEN & JAY! Two of my dearest friends got hitched. It was my great honor to be asked to craft a chuppah for their wedding. Helen loves batiks so we conferred over the equilter.com website to find the perfect colors to complement Helen's gorgeous red dress and Jay's signature navy blazer. EQuilter always has an amazing selection of batiks so it was easy to find just what we wanted (but hard not to order a boatload more!)

While waiting for the fabrics to arrive via mail, I availed myself of Home Depot's do-it-yourself curtain rod department and cut four poles to 7' specs. Home Depot has a selection of pre-cut curtain rods, in all sorts of fancy configurations, with fancy end-caps and so forth, but the pre-cut ones stop at 6' and well, Jay's a tall feller so we wanted to make sure he could stand tall while wedding his sweetheart (not to mention wanting to accommodate the statuesque officiate presiding ! ;-)

At home I sanded the ends, installed heavy-duty screw eyes

and then spray-painted the poles a lovely matte copper.

Finally~! The fabrics arrived and I set to work making a pool of pebbled aqua surrounded by a field of batik flowers surrounded by a maroon border. Here is the design laid out on batting and being affixed to the backing fabric, a sky-blue solid. We kept the design fairly simple as Helen didn't want a fancy design distracting from the beautiful fabrics.

If you have not tried the spray-adhesive for making the quilt/batting/backing sandwich, I recommend it highly. It saves oodles of time on basting or pinning.

We did a navy binding to seal the whole thing, then affixed streaming yards of light blue, maroon, and navy grosgrain to tie the chuppah to the poles.

(photo by Olivia Goldfine)

(photo by Olivia Goldfine)

Thank you Helen & Jay for letting me put my creative energies to work for your special day!
Congratulations on your marriage!
May you be a comfort and joy to each other for all of your days. <3