I have a secret guilty pleasure—tell no one! It’s that t.v. show called ‘Say Yes to the Dress,’ about brides and their families and friends, shopping for pricey wedding dresses.
Shows need plots, and in this one, it’s usually a power struggle. Whether concocted by producers, or genuine, I don’t know (people say ‘reality t.v.’ is an oxymoron), but on nearly every episode, a sister, mother, best friend, or groom tries to force the bride to buy something that he or she loves, but the bride does not.
And when the bride does find a dress she loves, and emerges from the dressing room to show it off on the store's runway, the offender(s) giggle and carp: “You look like a linebacker!” “You look like a bedspread!” or, the classic, “You look like a hooker!” The bride scurries back to the changing room in tears (except for that one bride who wanted to look like a hooker).
In the dressing room, one of the sales associates – all skilled psychotherapists – gives the bride a powerful pep talk, explaining that if she’s old enough to get married, she’s certainly old enough to choose a dress. Meanwhile, the manager is scolding the rude entourage. An invisible, troubled-sounding male narrator ominously intones, “Will Rachel’s mom [sister/cousin /best friend] stand in the way of her dreams?”
After a commercial break or three, everyone behaves better, and the bride nearly always winds up with a gown she loves. In the closing moments, the now-jubilant narrator declares: “If a bride stays true to her style, she’ll glow as she walks down the aisle,” or, “If everyone keeps an open mind, she’ll walk down the aisle looking divine.” Or something like that, which almost rhymes.
Formula, yes, but in today’s troubled times, I find it soothing. As an unrepentant quilt embellisher, I enjoy looking at lace, tulle, silk, satin, tiaras, pearls, bows and bling. Pretty dresses, pretty brides, pretty crazy entourages and pretty steep prices (from $1,000 to $30,000 or more) – except for the tab, the stakes are pretty low. So it’s relaxing to listen to The Show while I quilt, or take coffee and chocolate breaks to watch.
Over the past several months, my whole life began to morph an episode of The Show. That’s because height of my addiction coincided with working on a commissioned quilt that would also serve as a wedding canopy, called a “chuppah,” at a Jewish wedding.
This bride first wrote to me in December telling me she wanted to
collaborate in making an heirloom quilt that would serve as a canopy for her
summer wedding, and then would stay in the family as a quilt for generations.
I‘ve made chuppot (the plural in Hebrew') before, but never while
hooked on bridal t.v. The next thing I knew, the edges of my daily
reality got all fuzzy, like on The Twilight Zone, and I transmogrified into the
supportive Sales Associate, while my bride became, well, The Bride. She had the
hopes and dreams, and it was my job to help her realize them.
Here are some of the lessons I learned that are as true of helping
a bride choose a wedding dress on reality television as they are of making a
bride a wedding quilt in regular old reality.
1. Start with the visuals. Sales associates like it when brides
bring in photographs of favorite gowns. They don’t have to guess from a zillion
possibilities. Similarly, my
collaboration with this bride started with images. She told me which quilts on
my website she liked best. She also told me she wanted a scene of Jerusalem in
the middle, surrounded by a Hebrew quotation. I started sketching variations
and emailing them to her as pdfs. (I sketch them on my computer - I find
Coreldraw easy and intuitive). I had some Jerusalem fabric in shades of gold,
and I scanned it to use it in the drafts as the Jerusalem landscape.
Ideas flew back and forth. (By the way, the Hebrew in this
image and the one below is nonsense/placeholder Hebrew. Don't worry, we
straightened it out!)
We soon learned that what really needed figuring out was the
border, which brought me to the next lesson…
2. More is more. In t.v.-land, some brides want it all – rhinestones,
pearls, lace, feathers, beads, ruching, fabric flowers, a train, the whole 9
yards (literally). The
sales associate has to break the news that more costs more. My bride especially admired one
of the most complex quilts on my
Judaiquilt website, called ‘Invocation’.
Oh sure, what’s not to like? That particular piece is the
quilty equivalent of a gown by P’nina Tornai (designer
of famously sexy, overwrought, expensive wedding
dresses. Yes, that's a see-through bodice).
Invocation isn’t sexy, doesn’t have any bodice, nor
tens of thousands of sparkly jewels and feathers, but it is a bit overwrought,
with a 500+ piece border, made from dozens of different batik fabrics in
shifting values, which took me, oh, about a decade (on and off) to
arrange.
So, just like a sales associate suggesting
only gowns within the bride’s budget, I tried very hard to focus my bride with
sketches of MUCH less complex borders (like, 14 pieces instead of 500).
No go. She kept choosing the more intricate options. I
reluctantly told her that, if she really wanted that 500-piece border, I would
have to raise the initial price. I held my breath, as they always do on The
Show, wondering if the bride’s family could or would pay the extra to get what
they really wanted. They did. Phew!
4. Sometimes the bride has to touch the textiles. From The Show, I learned that there
are poufy “ball gown”-style wedding dresses,
which differ from slender “mermaid gowns,” complete with tail fins – who knew? A
bride who walks into the salon wanting to look like Cinderella might, to her
shock, walk (or swim) out looking like The Little Mermaid. Or vice versa. Only by trying a dress on can a bride
learn what she likes.
Similarly, figuring out colors and
textures for our quilt. In our early emails, my bride told me she
imagined ‘royal’ colors, like golds, silvers, coppers, and whites. I couldn’t
quite figure how that would work in cotton batiks, which I had initially
planned on using (Batiks are what give Invocation a painterly quality). If a quilter’s
cotton isn’t overprinted with metallic ink, the golds, silvers and copper
become yellows, greys and brown. So I offered alternatives. What about adding
more color, in jewel tones, like blues, purples, greens? Then I had
another idea: What if I made the quilt in silk dupionis? Then they would have
the metallic sheen! I sent her lots of snapshots of different fabrics.
What a mess, right? It took me a while to realize that all these
photographs were confusing us further. A photo can only go so far in
capturing the real look, feel and hue. So, in desperation, I stuffed about 30
fabric swatches into an envelope, and mailed them to her, in the good old U.S.
Reality Mail. I asked her to sort them into three piles: Love, Indifferent, and
Hate.
She and her fiancé did the sorting together. When they mailed
those swatches back to me, in three marked bundles, I could never, ever
have predicted the results:
I stapled the results to three seperate pieces of paper. LOVE
swatches are on the left; INDIFFERENT in the Middle; and HATE on the
right.
They loved many of the blues, browns and tans. Hated all
purples and greens! They didn’t like grays (= cotton silvers). They were
indifferent to the pinks. But there were lots of exceptions, which took me
completely by surprise. They disliked several of the blues that were the exact
same hue as the blues they loved, but which had a different subtle print or
batiked design. Same with the browns. Same hue, but different patterns, raised
strong feelings in them, much, much more than I would have predicted
I hung the three sheets on my wall, and referred to them
frequently, making the quilt as much as possible from LOVE set, throwing in
INDIFFERENTs when necessary, and no HATES, of course. This very specific
information was pure gold in terms of steering my fabric choices.
