Unfinished Quilt Story 2: Tennessee Waltz/Jerry Springer Wedding Quilt
This combination of the Snowball and 54-40 or Fight was made popular in Judy Martin's book Scrap Quilts which really changed my quilting life -- even though this is a "planned" and not scrap variation.
Dear hubby asked me to make him a quilt for his niece who was getting married. She's actually the daughter of his best friend but niece is closer in many ways. Hubby moved away from Michigan to be with me in Seattle and hadn't seen her at that point in about 5+ years, really didn't know anything about her other than when she was a little girl and knew nothing about the husband-to-be so couldn't tell me anything about the couple. It wasn't a lot of notice on the wedding, about six months. I didn't have any projects going on and while I really don't like making a quilt for someone I don't know and I didn't have anything I wanted to do, I love my hubby so I said yes.
Went to the LQS for inspiration, and was taken by the background fabric. My design changed, went back to get more fabric (two days later) but it was gone, of course! But I did find another piece from the same line in a lighter colorway that I pieced into the border. You can see it if you look for it but I'm not going to point it out. I'm not really happy with the blue I chose, it needs to be a little bit stronger.
I paper pieced the star points so they'd be nice and crisp. While I say I'm not good at paper piecing, I can do this sort of thing especially after all this practice! It's the tiny little pictorial stuff I have problems with. I got the quilt top finished, it was about a month before the wedding and I was pleased. And then the phone call came...
The wedding was called off. Bride and groom had a huge fight. We have only gotten bits and pieces but over the years we have now heard multiple sides of the story and pieced it together like an episode of the Jerry Springer show. So this is how I understand it: Bride-to-be accuses wild older sister of sleeping with the groom. Older sister had dated groom-to-be but he was not the baby daddy of either of her kids and she didn't want him. Groom was dating younger sister just to get back at older sister and it sort of got out of control and he never really asked her to marry him, she just started planning the wedding.
I will eventually finish this quilt. I'm not sure how I'm going to quilt it, I'll probably have a reason to finish it off in a hurry and just do some sort of all over edge to edge design. Maybe heavy stippling or pebbles in the white? Dunno. Designing the quilting is the Achilles heal of my process.