Guestbook Wedding Quilt

Having guests sign a quilt instead of a guest book is a great way to create wall art that will last a lifetime. With a simple design, it’s not hard at all to do!

Materials

• Various pieces of cotton quilting material for front, minimum 6″ wide
• Quilting material for back and binding
• Spray starch
• Equilateral triangle ruler
• Archival fabric pens
• Wool batting

Step 1: Cut pieces of fabric

Have guests sign pieces, not a finished quilt. People will be giddy, drunk, and make mistakes, at a wedding. Have guests sign pieces of fabric that you’ll piece together, rather than making the quilt beforehand.

Use a 60-degree ruler to cut triangles no smaller than 5.5″ or 6″ high, as measured from the center of the base to the point (about 8″ length of each side of the equilateral triangle)

Step 2: Create clear instructions

When you piece, you’ll be doing 1/4″ seams, so guests need to stay at least 1/2″ away from the edges. Be extremely clear, like give a scale of what 1/2″ is. Many will still write into the seam.

Step 3: Spray starch and iron the pieces

To make the fabric easier to write on, spray starch the back and iron it to make it stiffer.

Step 4: Guests sign on the day-of!

Step 6: Piece together the fabric in rows

Lay out your fabric based on color and what people have written, and sew them into rows.

Step 7: Create the quilt

This tutorial doesn’t go into the details of making a quilt sandwich, but you can read many tutorials here. I recommend using wool batting; it seems to show more loft than cotton batting, but not as much as polyester.

Step 8: Choose a simple quilting pattern

You don’t want to detract from the signing, so I quilted a simple pattern between the triangles in diagonal lines.

Step 9: Floating hanging

Hand-sew a strip of fabric on the back that you can put a thin piece of board through (get thin board at Home Depot). Put an eyelet through the end of the wood and use short nails to hang!

Finish!