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Ali and Jeremy, at their wedding, flanked by Marc and Marcia.
Stitcheu Together
A unique wedding display becomes a treasured gift for two brides and grooms.
Shelli Liebman Dorfman Senior Writer
ake one dad — immersed in genealogy — and one mom, artistically tal-
ented, with patience honed over years as a pre-school teacher. Put them
in wedding-planning mode with an ambitious gift idea, and you get a
personalized, quilted heirloom, highlighted with fabric photos of the bride and groom and
their families.
And for Marcia and Marc Manson, who have two sons, you get it twice.
"I wanted to give our sons and their brides something they could have forever," Marcia
said. "I decided to make them quilts that included pictures of their families and their
ancestors."
Once the word "ancestors" was mentioned, Marc — past president of the
Jewish Genealogical Society of Michigan — jumped in, taking charge of the photos. "I
wanted to use pictures of the couples growing up," Marc said. And I thought it was
important to also include photos of both living and deceased family members that the
kids knew — and that goes back to their great-grandparents."
Before the quilts would become keepsakes, the Mansons, who live in Farmington Hills,
wanted them to be used as the ceiling of the chuppah each couple used, something that
is a family heirloom in its own right.
"It was made by all the cousins 20 years ago," Marcia said. "We each needlepointed a
part of it. It was designed and assembled by Rachel of Rachel's Needlepoint [and Judaic
Gifts in Southfield] and has been used all over the country and in Israel by members of
the family."
The first quilt the Mansons made was for their son Benjamin and his wife Randi's June
2005 wedding; the second one for Jeremy and Ali's wedding this past summer.
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celebrate!
March 2009
Marc began his part by gathering piles, boxes and albums of photos of the couples
and their families and scanning them Into his computer. He then assembled both a com-
puterized disk of all the pictures and a set of framed photos of family members — going
back seven generations — for each couple, the brides' parents and the Mansons.
"I picked which of the photos to use in the quilts by putting them on the floor so I
could see them all," Marc said.
In addition to choosing photos of family members, Marc matched up pictures of the
couples involved in similar activities, "It was sort of like playing Concentration," he said. "I
found photos of both of them riding horses and bikes at the same age, posing with a bat
during softball games and from their bar and bat mitzvahs."
On the computer, Marc touched up and colorized the photos in sepia, a red-brown tint
used to create a warm, antiqued look, and printed them onto photographic fabric paper.
"Then I cut the material around the pictures and my seamstress, Naomi Doren [of West
Bloomfield] sewed the pieces together into the quilts," Marcia said.
Each quilt has 64 pictures - 32 of the brides and their families and 32 of the grooms
and the Manson family — and is 72 inches square, The first one took about a year-and-a-
half to complete, the second about six months.
Each couple received their gift at a Shabbat dinner the weekend of their wedding. "When
my parents presented Ali [Spalter] and I with our quilt, we were taken back by its beauty
and the love they showed in creating something Ali and I will have forever," Jeremy said.
Randi (Brenner) said she and Benjamin knew something was in the works when Marc
asked Randi for family photos. But I had no idea what they were for," she said. "I thought
maybe they were assembling a family picture."