"25"

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.