Thing Ten: Miss Manners Suggests

I don't like shopping from wedding registries. I mean, yes, I get that the couple likes to be able to choose their own china patterns, and they shouldn't have to deal with the fact that I, personally, think everyone should have extremely brightly colored towels, but I just think it's so boring. I mean...I know they can see what's been bought, and they'll know how much I spent, and it's just awful. I'm much more into finding antiques, or making something, or doing both of those things. Like, for example: Danielle, my oldest friend (by which I mean the friend I have been friends with the longest, not the friend who is actually the oldest), got married last September. I gave her and her husband Matt this:

Yeah. That's an antique steamer trunk, from the 1880s. I spent weeks refinishing the interior, and then brought it to her parent's house a couple of days before the wedding.

My friend Jennie and David got married eleven months before that. I gave them...um...well, I'm pretty sure I brought them home a really nice photo album from my trip to Italy, and gave them that, but their REAL present, the present that I started planning almost a year in advance, was a quilt. I got their family and close friends to draw pictures on plain cotton squares, and mail them back to me, and I collected them, and I cut out all the patches for the bits in between...and then I started my thesis. So they sat. And they sat. And they sat and sat and sat, and I moved them (twice!), and now they're in a box in my storage unit.

And I know that they say that you have a year to send a wedding gift, but their second anniversary is only six months away, so I am WELL PAST that deadline. And it's going to take me months to do this thing, not least of all because I am not exactly an expert quilter. By which I mean I have never made a completed full-sized quilt. So this one is going to be...a challenge. But I am determined! David graduates from dental school next month, and they're moving home, and I am GOING to finish this quilt and bring it to them in their new house. It shall be done!