The Wedding Dress Quilt - www.hoorayforrain.com

My friend Amy is pretty much the best. It's not enough that she is beautiful and one of the funniest people on earth - she also has impeccable style. Check out her wedding dress.

Plenty of women buy beautiful designer wedding dresses when they are planning their wedding. Amy is the only woman I know who fell in love with a L.A.M.B. dress in 2006 and had the vision and confidence to commit to it as her future wedding dress and stash it in her closet until she was ready to tie the knot this year.

That DRESS! Right? Non-traditional, modern, and completely unforgettable.

Amy's wedding to Brad (known affectionately in our circle of friends as B-Rad) was incredibly beautiful. I was so happy to be there.

And naturally, I made them a quilt.

It didn't take me long to settle on Amy's amazing dress as my inspiration. I sketched and pieced the top fairly quickly, and even basted the layers...and then it sat for almost a year as I deliberated on how to quilt it. Every time I opened the door to my sewing room, this beauty would greet me.

I'd do a bit of sketching whenever inspiration hit. Here are just a few of my doodles from when I was figuring out how to quilt it.

I finally settled on the sketch below as my guide. I transferred my little 4x6-inch drawing onto a queen-sized quilt in a few steps.

First, I practiced my planned quilting lines in certain areas to make sure I liked how it looked. I used an ingenious idea by Krista Withers, where you buy a piece of plexiglass and place it on your quilt, and practice your quilting patterns with dry erase pens. So helpful! Krista points out that you should mask off the edges of your plexiglass so that you don't draw right off the side of it and onto your quilt - that tip was a lifesaver.

After I'd practiced and refined my quilting plans, I used Frixion pens to draw my quilting lines on the quilt. The lines from Frixion pens disappear with heat, so I'd draw a section, quilt it, and then iron away any markings that still showed. When I didn't like some of the lines I'd drawn, I ironed them away and started over.

My only regret with this quilt was that I didn't finish in time to take better photos. This queen-sized quilt stretched me to the limits of my capabilities on my domestic machine, but ultimately I was pretty happy with the overall effect. The half circles in the top section repeat the big half circle in turquoise, brown and yellow. I wanted the middle section to be structured, and the bottom section to flow and swirl like the drape of Amy's dress.

Thanks mostly to the puppy addition to our family this summer, I didn't finish the quilt until the night before we flew to California for the wedding. The light was fading fast when the quilt came out of the dryer, so I dragged Patrick outside to quickly take some pictures for me, but I had no time to round up a friend to help me hold up the corners of the quilt!

I carefully rolled the quilt up and took it as my carry-on. I had grand visions of running around on the beach with the quilt for a photo shoot, but ultimately chickened out because I was scared of getting it dirty. I settled for taking more pictures of my crinkled and wrinkled quilt in our hotel room.

One last little detail - for my quilt label, I took the beautiful Gemology quilt block by SarahRose Quilts and reduced it to 50%, making a tiny, adorable three-inch gem block that felt very fitting for a wedding quilt.

I gave the quilt to Amy and Brad the day after the wedding, and luckily they both loved it. Amy told me that it was not likely to stay pristine and white because it was going to be used. Nothing could make me happier, because that's what quilts are for.

I have entered this quilt in the modern category of the Blogger's Quilt Festival at Amy's Creative Side. There are all kinds of beautiful quilts on display, check them out for some fresh inspiration!

Hooray for Rain!