Saturday, July 19, 2014

Soleil Quilt

A few weeks ago, my boss came up to me and said every crafter's dreaded words "So I saw this thing on Pinterest..." I'm just kidding! I love being roped into attempts to recreate Pinterest ideas. 

The idea was to take her bridesmaid dress from a friend's wedding, and turn it into a baby quilt for that same friend who is now pregnant. One trip to the fabric store later, a pile of assurances that the random pieces of fabric and dress would indeed turn into a blanket, and I was on my way!

I will never sew with chiffon again. It is slippery and doesn't retain cut shapes well. My first attempt at making the squares work led to the glue staining the chiffon, so I ended up completely destroying the dress, and redoing the squares with a better glue to hold both fabrics in place. For the dress squares (the blue), I used the chiffon as the top layer, and glued it to the dress lining for stability.

Fighting with chiffon aside, I'm really happy with how this quilt worked out. It is meant for a girl, so she was concerned the blue would be an issue. I think we did a good job of choosing colours that made it less masculine, and I really like the contrast of the bright colours against the softer border.


Materials:
bridesmaid dress
quilting cotton
self-made cotton binding
cotton flannelette

Quilt Top


Quilt backing and detail

My favourite part about this quilt is the border fabric. The elephants are just too cute!