I’ve been rather quiet here since this summer, which I attributed to wedding planning stress and an unexpected, last-minute move. Those things happened, but they didn’t stop me from making things—the real reason I’ve been so quiet is that my maker energies have almost all been focused on a massive, secret project: the wedding quilts.

When Mr. Jones and I got engaged, we knew immediately that we wanted to give something to our families that would reflect how loved and supported we’ve felt not only in our relationship but throughout our lives. We decided to each take on a project: he would hand-carve and wood burn a series of walking sticks, and I would make quilts. Five of them.

Aside from a couple of cryptic Instagram posts, I managed to stay mostly silent about the project. Now that the wedding’s over and the quilts have been gifted, though, I can finally blog about them!

Mr. Jones and I picked out the pattern together: we chose Purl Bee’s Crossroads Quilt as the base.

We then tweaked it a bit so that instead of using a print fabric for the “crossroads” overlap bits, we wove the two narrow stripe colors in and out.

We decided on white and red for our stripes, then chose five different shades of blue and gray (one for each recipient) for the backgrounds. (Breaking out the Kona Color Card to match our photoshopped pattern to actual fabric: so awesome.)

Once we ordered the fabric, we went into production mode: we washed and ironed all of the quilt top fabric at once, which involved…a lot of ironing. I spent a couple of nights cutting everything up, and then I taught Mr. Jones how to press open seams so we could tag-team the piecing process. Photos here are lacking; please accept this photo of Margot instead.

We finished the piecing just before the move and picked up the quilting stage once we had settled into the new place. No photos of this, aside from the mountain of double fold bias tape I made one weekend:

I took an embroidery class in mid-September, then made custom labels for each quilt with our initials, the initials of the recipient, and our wedding logo (I never thought I’d be the kind of person to have a wedding logo, either. I know.).

Four long months of secret-keeping and blog silence later, we had wedding quilts.