It's always a food event!

My intention was to make a quilt for my wonderful husband to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary in November 2015.  We had taken our first cruise to Bermuda in June of that year to celebrate our anniversary and I took hundreds of pictures of that trip.  So I changed my mind and made him a picture book with many of the pictures and lots of descriptions of the event.  Now that I had all of the fabrics, I decided to make the quilt for him for Christmas.  We have a rule that we don't buy each other gifts for Christmas, but I figured making him a quilt didn't count as a purchased gift. 

There is a back story to this quilt.  My husband loves to eat, especially when we go somewhere.  Where ever we go, we always need to find a place to eat.  Doesn't matter if it's breakfast, lunch or dinner!  We have a standing joke that every place we go is a "food event", or needs to be! 

So, I started collecting food fabrics.  You name the food, I found fabric for it.  Liver is the only food he will not NEVER eat!  It took a while, but I was able to get 82 different foods.  My biggest issue was finding fat quarters.  I certainly didn't need very large pieces of each fabric, even a fat quarter gave me more than I needed for the blocks.  I did find some at quilt shows and I found a good number online, especially at the www.4my3boyz.com site.  They had all the foods I needed by the FQ.  Many were on sale, but their prices were great.  My husband is used to seeing boxes and bags of fabrics on our doorstep so I had them delivered right under his nose.  He often brought the packages to me not knowing he would eventually be sleeping under them! 

So the fabrics were chosen, now what pattern should I use? 

I thought about the illusion block that would make them look like the blocks were floating.  I made a few blocks but then discovered that quilt would turn out to be bigger than I had planned.  I wanted a large lap that would cover him in his recliner at the cabin but it also needed to cover our Kirby dog who always sleep at this feet.  I went with the "KISS" method and sewed the blocks together with the columns offset.  That let the blocks show off by themselves and eliminated the need to match seams. 

Next I had to decide about borders, backing and binding.  I needed to keep the backing on the masculine side and wanted to pick that before I decided on the border.  Not as easy as I thought.  Then I went to the quilt show in Oaks, PA and found the perfect fabric - I bought all they had.  So now with the backing, I found a good color for the borders.  Black was the obvious choice for the binding. 

I was able to get the top done complete with borders, the backing cut and sewn to size and the binding made but did not have enough time to get it to the long armer in time for Christmas.  I packed them all together and gave it to him nicely packaged!  It went to the quilter at Olde City Quilts as soon as the holiday was over.  Six weeks later, he was sleeping under it! 

Finished top laying on the backing fabric

 

Backing fabric with border fabric.  The backing fabric is all different soda caps!

Almost done!

 

He was shocked, but he loved it! 

 

 

I decided to have the quilting done in circles to match the shape of the bottle caps on the backing fabric.  It turned out great! 

 

 

So now, where ever we are, it will ALWAYS be a food event!