With wedding season approaching, today we’ll look at our Love Birds and Congratulations tapestries, to give you inspiration for your lettering, as well as lots of examples of colours for backing your finished work.
Both Love Birds and Congratulations are perfect to stitch for weddings or anniversaries. We have many other kits for you to consider for your couple’s big day – including one you could stitch over a weekend, especially a wet weekend in February or March!
Starting off with something blue we have Anna and Andrew’s Love Birds, with Forget-Me-Not blue velvet for piping and backing.
View from the side:
For Tor and Huw’s Love Birds, we used a darker blue velvet for border and backing, with contrast red piping.
And again, the side view:
For Kay and Jon’s anniversary Love Birds we used navy cotton, for a crisp edge.
On to Congratulations, and for Niamh and Daniel’s Congratulations we used a pale grey velvet for border and backing, with cream velvet piping.
How lucky that Niamh and Daniel’s name just about managed to fit in the space available!

Side view of Niamh and Daniel’s cushion:

Congratulations is great if you are a nervous about planning a large name panel or if your couple has unbalanced names, ie one long and one short, and one of the names won’t fit into the lettering space. As an example, Steve would be fine and would fit into the space but Philippa is a bit tricky. A simple ‘SD + PS’ provides the perfect solution.
Below we have Philippa and Steve’s Congratulations cushion ready to send to them. We used duck egg cotton for piping and backing with contrast cream piping.

Cream is a popular colour for wedding cushions. For Kate and Will’s Love Birds, we used cream cotton for piping and backing:
Kate and Will’s Love Birds cushion from the side…
Evie and Henry’s Congratulations tapestry, again in cream cotton but this time with a mitred border.

We have a cream velvet too, teamed up with raspberry velvet for piping for JW and CB’s 30th anniversary cushion:

See all of our fabric options in one place To see all of our velvet, woolly and cotton fabrics together, take a look here. It’s a shortcut to take you to a separate blog post on each fabric, with their codes for you to quote for us to use for your tapestry.
If, like us, you are a great believer in the old adage ‘blue and green should always be seen’, you’ll like this cute Congratulations tapestry stitched for Dan and Vicky.

Next we have Sue’s Love Birds tapestry, stitched to celebrate her 60th wedding anniversary with husband Chris. What an achievement, well worth stitching for!
We used a light green velvet for the border and backing of Sue and Chris’s cushion, with contrast blue piping.
Ron and Shirley Love Birds in glowing gold velvet, with extra hearts in the lettering panels.
If you’d like a neutral backing for your tapestry, we have a good selection in our cotton fabrics. For James and Rebecca’s Love Birds we used Biscuit cotton for border, piping and backing.
Barbara stitched a Congratulations tapestry stitched as a very special gift for her friends Carol and Joe’s 50th Anniversary.
Top tip! Barbara left out the houses and hearts in the top and lower borders to make room for more text.
When we made up Barbara’s cushion we used Biscuit cotton for the mitred border, with raspberry cotton for piping and backing:

It looked very smart from the side:

Now for something completely different, Jan’s Love Birds stitched for Leanne and Darren, both fans of purple.
The bold purple border is really striking and picks out colours from some of the flowers in the design. Jan’s used the darker damson colour from the design for the lettering to tie it all together.
Top tip! Love Birds can be stitched for a birthday (or retirement, new home gift), as well as for a wedding or anniversary.
With Jane’s Love Birds birthday tapestry, Barbara stitched her name and date panels in wonderful rainbow shades. Jane’s name fits in beautifully – even with such a long middle name!
Here’s the top of Jane’s Love Birds cushion, showing the colours we used for making up, in two of our new cotton fabrics, Fawn for the backing and Grape for piping.
For Sheila and Chris’s Love Birds we used Meadow Grass cotton for border and backing, with Harbour blue cotton for piping.
Side view of Sheila and Chris’s Love Birds, a really lovely combination:
We’ve seen Jane’s birthday Love Birds stitched for her birthday, and we’ll finish now with Poppy’s Love Birds, stitched for her 21st birthday.
We used Indigo woolly fabric for border and backing of Poppy’s cushion, with contrast piping in red.
That’s it from us for now, and we hope you’ve enjoyed seeing these tapestries together.
As always, do get in touch if you need help or advice before sending in a tapestry for our making up service. We show lots of completed tapestries on Jolly Red’s Facebook page and on Pinterest too.
If you’d like to see some other designs from our range stitched for weddings and anniversaries, click here.
Happy stitching!
Kelly x
PS Remember to sign up for our newsletter for all the latest from our Somerset workshop. We have some fabulous new designs coming your way for spring stitching, one of which may well be another option if you’ve already stitched Love Birds and Congratulations.