Lego Chuppah, Part II

Today pictures are uploading, so I'll try again...my friends Jen and Claire created the above image as their vision for their chuppah and left it to me to translate it into a quilt.

After printing a copy of the design, I first traced it onto graph paper so I could figure out proportions and begin to think through how to cut and sew the fabric.


I took the picture above when I was in the middle of sewing. The writing beneath the image charts the size of each "lego piece" and the blue indicates sections I had already sewn. I broke the lego chain into smaller units in order to figure out how to piece it together. A more experienced quilter would probably have been able to figure out how to strip piece some of the blocks, but I stuck with the tried, true, and longer method of cutting out individual pieces and chain sewing them together.











I purposefully worked on the lego sections, which effectively serve as borders, first because I knew they would be more complicated and take more time than the middle. I made a few errors along the way, sewing pieces together incorrectly, but nothing was unfixable.















I ended up with 4 sections about 50 inches long, which was perfect for a chuppah that I wanted to be around 60 inches by 60 inches. (Again, more experienced folks would be able to ensure that their end quilt was precisely the size they intended it to be. In my case, being within a couple inches on a quilt pattern I've never made before, seems perfectly acceptable to me.)

When Jen, Claire, and I talked, they noted that while their design used an array of colors, they didn't want the chuppah to actually resemble the red, blue, green, and yellow legos of childhood fun. We agree that "cool" colors -- blues, purples, and greens -- would constitute the pieces, and I rummaged through my stash of fabric to find a wide variety of patterns to use. There are some fabrics that I only used once and others that I used multiple times. Given that most pieces were between 1x1.5 and 2.5x2.5, I would have felt I was wasting fabric if I had only cut one piece from most of them.

The middle of the quilt, per the design, is all white. In order to ensure the quilt would hang together and look like more than a white sheet with some fancy borders, I used 2 different white-on-white fabrics for the center snail's trail pattern. The center is one huge snail's trail block, which I like for this chuppah because it conveys the sense of intertwined lives. Here are some close-ups:
















I may or may not post full pictures of the chuppah before the wedding -- it will depend on whether Jen and Claire want to see it ahead of time or not. But rest assured, I will post pictures of the chuppah in its entirety as well as it being used.

Edited to add: see pictures of the entire chuppah here and here.