Merry Christmas everyone! Hopefully your Christmas was as grand as mine: I got a dishwasher leaving me all sorts of time to sew! We sewed all day yesterday and managed to get the quilt top together... which lead Mom to ask "Why haven't you gotten more posts up on that blog" and me answering "Umm..." so here we go.

We finally got working on some blocks. 

And before we knew it we had blocks made!

Ok, to be fair, it wasn't before we knew it. These blocks took forever to make: about 6-8 hours a block. Which was a little insane. So, to be more realistic, eventually, after what seemed like eons, we had blocks.

This block that Mom made made 8 hours seem like a snap. She took beading off of one of the dresses and inserted it into the blocks- however, she had to take off the beads wherever seams were, and make sure that each piece had the same beading on it... it took forever.

The rest of us were not as insane, and made blocks from Thursday afternoon until Sunday afternoon, working from 7 or 8 in the morning until 10 of 11 at night. Granny complained that I was running a sweat shop.

She also proclaimed that while, back in her day she might have had to cut fabric out of old clothes to make quilts, but now you could just go to a store and get it. So why on earth were we going to all this work?

But of course, her blocks turned out even if she had to make them out of old dresses. Mine on the other hand....

These are the blocks that we managed to get finished at retreat, all up on the design board.

The quilt top is together now, thanks to a sewing day in my mom's studio: stay tuned to find out what happened there!

Later days!

Kathleen

Hard at Work

The next step of course... actually doing work. We had a great big stack of printed paper pieced Mariners Compass blocks (112 pages of them...) and all we had to do now was start sewing.

And so, finally, we started cutting out our pieces...

And at last, sewing the pieces back together...

Soon it was coming along...

Needless to say, soon there were blocks.

Stay tuned to see the full block!

Procrastination

The first step in the process was... well we didn't know. So we procrastinated like crazy, visiting with all the other ladies at the retreat, before finally deciding that the first step was to tear apart wedding dresses. OK, so this may have been more procrastination to avoid figuring out how to actually sew the dresses back together, but soon we were hard at work.

Ok, in all honesty, maybe we weren't working THAT hard...

Well, no matter how hard we were working, eventually we ended with piles and piles of wedding dress.

So, rather than a mess of dress, soon the fabrics were sorted into boxes (nicely labeled by none other than myself) and we were ready to start sewing.

How did the sewing process go? Stay tuned to find out!

Kathleen

The Wedding Dress Quilt

Welcome to the Wedding Dress Quilt Blog!

A few months ago, I stumbled upon the Making Memories Breast Cancer Foundation and their quilting challenge: they send you a box of wedding dresses, and you make a quilt out of them. So, my grandmother, my mother (a breast cancer survivor) and myself decided (or well, I decided and decided to drag more of my family down with me) to make a quilt out of old wedding dresses.... and the box arrived a few weeks later...

We decided to add some pink silks to the fabrics: a kit called "Pink Purpose" from Brewer that also benefits breast cancer:

We started the quilt at Quilting From The Heart's fall retreat. The first step was un-boxing all the quilts (Ok, me and my friends had already un-boxed them and tried them all on, but I decided not to count that....) All the other ladies were pretty excited to see what we were doing...

Finally me and my grandma (from here on referred to as "Granny") managed to get our hands on some dresses.

So what happens next? Stay tuned to find out!

Later days.
Kathleen