Sewing with saris

Because I can't quilt until the machine is fixed, I decided to work on one of my customer commissions. A woman brought me three saris from her mother-in-law who had recently passed away. She wants five quilted projects made from these saris. I had never seen one before, and it will be a new experience for me to do these quilts. Each one of the saris is 43" x 110" of fabric.
Two of the three saris are silk, and one is cotton. One is a beautiful, and obviously dressy silk, with two colors for the warp and weft. This makes the fabric have a shimmer when it moves from the light maroon to gold. One end is heavily embroidered with gold thread, and there is a border of wide gold ribbon along three sides of the fabric. This one will have to be stabilized with interfacing to keep it from raveling. The quilt from this will be the most difficult to make, so I'm leaving it to last!
The second piece will be made into a wall hanging for the granddaughter. It is dark blue patterns on a white background of voile fabric. Extremely lightweight and drapey. I will also be adding stabilizer to this.
The last one is a lightweight silk with purple stylized elephants on a yellow-orange background. I need to make two baby quilts from this for a new set of twin grandbabies. I decided to start here.
I cut a strip from the center of the fabric for experimentation. I pressed it, but it was still to fluid to cut with any precision or sew easily. Spray starch to the back of the fabric made it like thin paper. Worked great! I want these quilts to be soft in the end, so didn't want to use the fusible interfacing if I didn't need to.

This is the stabilized with starch fabric, ready for cutting and sewing.

I used the printed border from the sides of the fabric to make end borders, and left the fabric in a whole piece, rather than doing a lot of piecing. With the drawing expertise  of Mr Wazoo, I made an elephant template and cut two from purple fabric with fusible web on the back. I added the saddle cloth like in the original fabric, and sewed all of this down with Glide thread in a light orange color. Simple but effective!

Both quilts look the same, but the printed cloth on the elephant's back is slightly different so each twin has a unique quilt. I used a tear-away stabilizer for the eye, and it stayed nice and flat. Buttonhole stitch set at 2.6  worked great for the outline.

This is the finished flimsy, still soft (as you can see! It was a challenge to get it to stay on the design wall...) and ready to quilt. I'll get ther second one done today. It ended up 43" x 53".

The weather has been beautiful, so Mr W and I ventured out to our favorite nursery in Hayesville, NC and picked up two new shrubs and a new plant for the planter outside my studio.  He spent the afternoon digging and planting. A nice Father's Day gift!