Ugly or Interesting? Read about it before you decide.

foodquilt4I’ve been working on this quilt for my teenage son.

I’m racing against the clock to get it done for Christmas. All I have left is hand sewing the binding and then I’ll need to make a quilt label (Don’t forget the quilt label!!)

It certainly was not my choice of fabric.  The pattern however, is the disappearing hourglass that I discovered in one of the recent Block magazines from Missouri Star Quilt Co.

The fabric has been the choice of my son, over the course of, oh, 13 years.  If you quilt and have a child, you know what I mean.

For years, basically his whole childhood, I would drag him to quilt shops.  He would slouch into a chair in a corner and wait for me to finish.  Usually.  However, on a number of occasions, he would approach me with a bolt of fabric.  Not a lovely bolt of fabric.

It was usually a bolt of french fries, or pizza, or chocolate chip cookies. Was this child always hungry? And because I wanted to encourage him (and also felt a little guilty for dragging him around), I would purchase a half yard here, a half yard there.

Well over the years, we had assembled quite a collection of food fabric.

And this year, because he’s old enough now, not to be shuffled from quilt shop to quilt shop, I made him a quilt of all the fabric he had selected over the years.

Don’t judge me.  This is not what he eats every day…but apparently what he thinks about while in quilt shops.

foodquilt1I guess what I’m enjoying about the quilt is that up close, you can see the details of the food, but you have to step back a bit to notice the quilt pattern.

foodquilt3foodquilts2foodquilt6It was larger than I expected, hanging over the top of a full size bed, so quilting was a bit of a challenge.

borderThe border is chocolate chips.  My son picked out the binding fabric which I thought was quite hideous against the chocolate chips.

So I added a small flat piping to separate the two fabrics…and miraculously, it looks pretty great.  I would never have selected any of these fabrics, but the random surprises of letting someone else choose turned out to be the best part.

backFinally, I pieced the backing from other fabrics he had selected along the way:  maps, pheasants and computer gear.

Want to know what floats around in your kid’s head?  Bring him (or her) to quilt shops and let them wander and select a few things.

You may or may not be surprised. But I guarantee it will be interesting.