The Dresses Quilt

Last year I was contacted by a quilter friend asking if I would consider making a commission quilt - the shop she works for had a customer who wanted a memory piece made from the gowns her daughter had worn as a bridesmaid. Against my better judgement I said "yes" because the project sounded intriguing.

It took many weeks to finally get the go-ahead to do the project after I had provided a bunch of design ideas to the shop. At no time did I meet the customer and that made it more challenging. Thankfully, there was no immediate time limit.

These are the dresses I had to work with. They date back a "few" years judging by the look of them. The black fabrics are all velvet. One of the requirements was that I use the fabrics from the dresses which meant cutting into them in strategic places. To get the velvet necessary for all three dresses for instance, I cut the lower half of each of the long sleeves on the yellow and black dress.

Here is the end result. For each dress I drafted a pattern, to scale, and then also added embellishments; beading, buttons, dimensional rose and hand embroidery

Ordinarily I am  not a "pink person" so this was a real challenge. In addition to the dresses I was also required to use those three pink fabrics and that white background - I "forgot" to also use a beige fabric similar to the white background.

I am having such a problem with blogger tonight that I am afraid to write anything more. I ws finally able to add the detail photos but I cannot add any individual comments to them so I am going to admit defeat and post as is.

Am I the only one having problems with blogger just now? It is taking forever to load photos.

Anyway, back to the subject of tonight's post - the customer has apparently finally collected her quilt and is happy with it. So now I can share it with you. It was a fun project but if I was to do this again I would want to do it with a different modus operandi.