Fab Bee Quilt

This quilt  was made for my oldest son with the help of the Fab Bee members (Cynthia Frenette, Holly Broadland, Barb Mortell, Darlene Barnes, Ellen Lewis, Berene Campbell, Bea Rocco, Sherri Chalke, Amy Dame, Barbara Macleod and Christoper Mair).  I’m so grateful and thrilled with the results!

Because this quilt was so large, it’s 90″x 96″, I decided to take it to a longarm quilter. I was surprised by the wonderful sense of relief I felt dropping it off . Unfortunately, I was also surprised by the dreadful feeling I felt  picking it up. I ended up reworking a lot of the quilt. Perhaps I should have gone back and said, I’m really not happy with this. However, when I saw the quilt all I wanted to do was get out of the shop as fast as possible and fix it myself. Which is what I did. I spent the better part of a day quilting and adding a heavier thread in random spots. I love it now. In hindsight if I were to ever have someone longarm one of my quilts I’d do up a sample to show them what I wanted instead of explaining it. I think what it came down to, the longarm quilter and I weren’t on the same wave length. Lesson learned.

My son hasn’t been one of those teenagers who’s been dying to shed all of his boyhood stuff. I’ve offered a couple of times to make him a quilt to replace the one I made him when he was 8 but he would always say, “why, I’ve got one.” Even when I told him, “you know you’re getting to a point where your friends might ask, “Dude what’s with the baby quilt?”, he ‘d just shrugged his shoulders like, oh well. So I made this one just in case he changed his mind. Okay, confession time, I totally didn’t tell him I was making him a new quilt. He caught me ironing it on his bed . “Um, what are you doing?”  I think he was slightly terrified that ironing beds was a thing, especially after I had just insisted he learned how to clean a toilet.  It wasn’t the Monster Hunter quilt with the teeny tiny pieces he’d been hoping for but it wasn’t rejected either. And good news, ironing beds is not a thing, unless you’re taking pretty pictures to show on your blog, or you work for House and Home taking interior shots.

Before:

After:

Now,why trees, you ask?  I’m a huge fan of Gig posters. One of my all time favourite posters is by Strawberry Luna  for the band Spoon . When November 2012 rolled around it was my turn  to be the queen bee. I sent out a picture of the poster for inspiration, instructions (a fill in the blank letter, for when I do other bees) and, of course, fabric. Each person was asked to make a brown or teal tree. Basically they made long strips, which made for an efficient way to piece a quilt top.  Then lastly,  I sewed up a sample block, posted photos,  sat back and waited for my sewn up trees to come back to me in the mail.

Skip ahead to March 2013, before this quilt landed on my sons bed it was displayed at the Creative Stitches show in Abbotsford. Oh, did I mention, when doing the extra quilting, Mr Aurfill himself liked  my photo of it on Instragram!

When I made my son’s first quilt  I was thinking of the little boy he was at the time. This time around I wanted to think of who he will be and make a quilt that will grow with him… and one that won’t embarrass him when chicks come around. What, wait? Did I just say that?