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October is one of the favorite months for couples to marry, as 10 is a lucky number indicating the perfection of married life. For tradition-minded couples, an indispensable part of the arrangements is the acquisition of a wedding quilt.

In the old days, older family members would make the wedding quilt as part of a bride's trousseau. Later, many stores started selling them and people opted to just buy them instead of making them by hand. But today the quilt is disappearing as modern couples don't have the inclination to bother with it.

The wedding quilt is not an ordinary quilt in terms of its design and materials. The surface of the quilt, for instance, is normally embroidered with pictures that imply love and good fortune, like dragon and phoenix pairs or mandarin ducks (mandarin ducks mate for life and are therefore a symbol of conjugal felicity).

Some are covered with pictures of 100 children, indicating a flourishing family population for generations. The background color of the quilt is always a bright color. White is never used because of its funerary association.

Yet the traditional elements penetrate the whole quilt from outside to inside. These components are hidden inside the quilt but are still concerned indispensable in some traditional minds.

The thread that is used for sewing the quilt has to be up to a meter long and white. Although it could be tough work to handle a thread of this length, it's considered necessary for good luck for the marriage longevity.

Quilts of this sort have to be made by hand, and it takes two senior craftspeople more than half an hour of cooperative work to finish sewing the quilt together, and sewing is just part of the creative process. Cotton play versions are around 800 yuan ($ 126), while silk quilts are approximately 1300 yuan.

In some parts of China, jujubes and longan are hidden in the four corners of the quilt to carry blessings for the young couple to give birth to a son.

Wedding quilts are losing fans.