Fab Bee Quilt

This quilt  was made for my oldest son with the help of the Fab Bee members.  I’m so grateful and thrilled with the results!

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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.

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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:web-IMG_1187_edited

After:

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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.

01-Close-in-stacks-IMG_6641Fab bee blocks

 

 

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!

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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?