My wife and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary just a few months ago. I made her a quilt in celebration, using a Double Wedding Ring design and lots of silver metallic fabrics.
I scanned some of our wedding photos and other memorabilia, and had them printed on fabric at Spoonflower. I reduced the saturation in the photos before printing so that the colors are subtle and blend well with the neutral fabrics.
I used a Creative Grids template set for the Double Wedding Ring design. I scanned the center template and used it as a guideline in Photoshop for sizing the photos. Most of the photos did not fill the full template; for those, I pieced additional fabric on the sides before cutting to the template shape.
I also scanned the templates for the arcs and corners, and used these scans to generate paper-piecing patterns. I added stars in the corners, and I split the arcs into 9 segments (instead of the 8 in the template) in order to start and end with dark pieces while alternating values.
I incorporated a few Japanese fabrics, which is meaningful as my wife lived in Japan for a couple of years before we were married. There's even an electrical engineering related fabric to represent my career.
I used a metallic stripe in all of the melon centers, randomly varying the direction of the stripes. (This has less impact on the overall quilt than I thought it might.)
Most of the quilting uses Aurifil 50-weight cotton, but for the photos I used a 100-weight polyester thread. I like the way it looks on the photos, but my machine was not happy with this thread; I experienced quite a few breaks.
Here's the view of the back of a photo block, showing how I outlined the figures. I was afraid some of the images might end up too puffy, but I don't think they are that bad.
For all the centers that do not have a photo, I quilted different grid-based designs. I learned a number of these designs in a class with Christina Cameli at Quiltcon.
Here's a view of the label:
The back is a near-solid teal that I think works well with the silver. It's not quite the same teal as we had in our wedding, but it is a nod to our colors.
It's hard to tell from the photos, but the light fabrics in one of the rings are all a rose metallic, and in the ring below that, the light fabrics are all a gold metallic (they are on the left side). There is a total of 25 rings, naturally.
I did not have the quilt finished in time for our anniversary, but the last stitches went in on Christmas Eve -- so the quilt was under our tree on Christmas morning.
