It was a brisk, sunny day in March 2016 when a stack of packages arrived at my desk. Underneath the PR mailers and unsolicited product samples was a large brown box with a shipping address from Wisconsin. “It’s here,” I whispered to the cluster of writers typing away at the communal table around me. My colleagues broke out in applause. Tonight, I thought, I will be engaged.
My partner, Beth, and I had been together for about three years when we decided to get married. One thing (of many!) that convinced me we were right for each other was how intentional our relationship was, and is. If one of us cooked dinner one night, the other donned an apron the next. If someone handled vacation accommodations, the other planned the itinerary. We tried our best to work as a team.
Rethinking Tradition
When we talked about marriage, we were faced with all the traditions that came with it. The dress, the rings, the shockingly overpriced cake. We wanted something different, more like us. “What if we just threw it all out, pretended we'd never heard of weddings, and instead did whatever feels like it commemorates our love?” I asked her. “What would our party look like if we were raised on a desert island and had never known about the veils and awkward speeches?” She got me right away — she usually does.
The first order of business was the engagement. A surprise proposal didn’t feel quite right. I saw my friends get so stressed over popping The Question. A date night in Central Park or a random dinner became loaded with anticipation: Would he propose? The idea of the proposal being one partner's responsibility didn't fit our relationship. Besides, Beth isn’t a big fan of surprises (I can’t imagine anything she’d hate more than being surrounded with a mob of tourists as I get on one knee in front of the Eiffel Tower).
As for rings, we knew we would exchange them on our wedding day, but we wanted to don them together as we entered a new stage in our relationship. Besides, the history of the engagement ring (and many other elements of traditional weddings) never sat quite right with me. Historically, women wore engagement rings to indicate an impending transfer of ownership from father to husband, and as a marker of relationship status and the resulting uplevel in her social standing. Meanwhile, a man who was engaged remained unmarked; the status of his betrothal less critical to his identity.
Still, we did want to mark our engagement with something special that we could experience and enjoy together. Enter the mysterious brown box from Wisconsin. In it was our (much less expensive) version of an engagement ring: a quilt!
A Keepsake We Could Share
The idea for an engagement quilt came about as we were decorating our first shared apartment together — we both wished we had more original art, but we were working with a modest budget. One idea we batted around was a custom quilt, but the price tag felt hard to swallow.
Fast forward to discussing our engagement. The quilt idea reemerged, and this time, the price felt appropriate given what the finished product would represent.
As an author of craft books, I knew a lot of incredible crafty folks in the Brooklyn arts scene, including Kim, whom I'd met at a DIY event in Greenpoint. We stayed in touch when she moved to Wisconsin, when I saw she'd picked up quilting, I knew she would be perfect for our project. I emailed her with our idea, and she was immediately in. Our instructions were simple: Make a quilt of your choosing (we picked the color palette) and, when you finish it, stitch the month and year into the fabric and send it to us. The day we received it would mark our engagement.
History in the Stitches
Everything about the quilt was a perfect symbol of our growing relationship. Born in Mississippi, with many years spent living in Alabama and Tennessee, Beth noted the deep cultural and historical roots of quilts and quilting in the South. She spoke of Gee’s Bend (where bold, modernist quilts made mostly by Black women gained national recognition) and of a friend from Birmingham who asked guests to contribute a customized quilt square that she had sewn together for her wedding. I loved the idea of cozying up in our engagement quilt for years to come, our family evolving underneath its cotton patchwork.
Plus, the act of this keepsake being stitched together slowly and deliberately felt like the perfect representation of our relationship. The first time I saw Beth, I caught my breath as she walked past me in the lobby of the building where we both worked. Then, in a twist of fate, we began working at the same company. From there, we became close friends, our stories weaving a closer and closer knit until we started to date.
Kim got to work on the quilt in December of 2015. We told her to take her time — we wanted it to be something she loved as much as we would. The seasons passed in a blur of crowded subway rides, illegal grill-outs on the roof of our apartment and shoveling out the downstairs tenants in the winter (we were the acting supers of our building). A little more than a year later, that unsuspecting box landed on my desk.
The Engagement Night
That night, I left work early so I could beat Beth home. I picked up some flowers, candles and fresh ingredients for a special dinner. When I got home, I laid out our wedding rings (we had already purchased them to exchange on the big day) and the flowers next to the brown box with a pair of gold scissors that I bought especially for this night. Dinner was almost ready when Beth got home and saw the display. She beamed in the candlelight.
Together, we opened the box and withdrew the quilt. It was perfect. Peach, gray and black shapes punctuated the white fabric in a slightly staccato pattern. We kissed. We were engaged!
Almost a decade later, the quilt has become a part of our family in a way a diamond ring never could. It festooned our bed in Brooklyn, moved with us to our first home together in New Jersey. It got piled into a ball as our new dog, Olive, joined the fray. We’ve read beneath it, snuggled side by side in the winter and have let it air-dry on the clothesline in the summer. Instead of slipping on rings, we wrapped ourselves in something warmer — stitched with intention, and soft enough to carry us through the years.
Alison Caporimo is a content strategist, former magazine editor, and author. She's lead teams at BuzzFeed, Seventeen and more before pivoting to serve as content director at a tech startup.
