Wedding Gown Quilts seem to be the rage all over Pinterest! I’m sure you’ve seen a few wedding gown quilts come across your feed in your Pinterest account. Recently, a customer asked me to create two wall hangings from her wedding gown for her two daughters. This was a fun and very challenging project!
Taking photos of white wedding gown quilts is very difficult! It is very hard to see the white quilting or trim on white fabric. I will include various shots of the quilts in this post and hope that you can identify what’s what!!
The gown itself was made of a knit fabric (this is actually the first time I’ve ever seen a gown made of a knit fabric). It is very common for gowns to be made of woven fabrics such as: satin, brocade, lace and taffeta, etc. However, since this gown was a knit fabric, it was necessary for me to fuse, or add fusible interfacing to the back side of all the pieces used in the quilt. The customer did purchase some white on white cotton fabric which I used as an inner border as well as on the four corners of the wall hangings. The white on white cotton was also used for the backing. Those cotton sections on the front of the quilt helped it to remain square.
Here are a few pics of the inside border and the corners of the quilt. I scalloped the outside borders of each quilt. A portion of the scalloped border can be seen in the photo below.
The entire front bodice and shoulders of the gown had lace attached to the knit fabric. The dress also had 1-1/4″ lace attached all the way around the hemline. I dissected the lace from the gown, which took many hours! Then the lace pieces were divided up into two piles to ensure that each quilt had the same amount of lace and trim-work.
I drew sketch after sketch, trying to determine what size would be the right size for each of the center quilt blocks, the corner squares, and the border sections. Once I had the drawing that worked best, I cut out the quilt blocks from the dress fabric and fused each block with fusible interfacing. Then I laid out the center 9-patch of the wedding gown quilt and auditioned the lace applique pieces around the 9-patch. Once I was satisfied with how it looked, I appliqued the lace to each of the 9-patch blocks and sewed the 9 blocks together. From there I pieced the white/white cotton inner border. Then, I cut out the outer wedding gown border sections from wedding gown fabric, appliqued the lace pieces onto each of those 4 sections and pieced the outer border section of the quilt.
Oh, yes! The hem-lace was also added to the outer border in four different locations.
The quilting was done on my Tin Lizzy long arm machine. All my quilting was free-motion done in either paisleys and feathering. Before quilting the outer borders, I drew a scallop border onto paper and traced that outer border onto the quilt in order to quilt that outside section in a scallop shape. The binding was done by creating a faux piping using both the wedding gown fabric as well as the white/white cotton fabric. A label and a sleeve were also added to each quilt.
Hope you enjoyed viewing this post on the creation of the Wedding Gown Quilts! Let me know if you have any questions!
Happy Quilting!
Lori