8 years . . .

A couple of months ago, when Mr. Beadgirl finally got his new office, he asked me to make him a wall quilt for it. For about a week I racked my brains, trying to come up with a good design, but I wasn't really inspired by anything. Then I walked into the City Quilter and saw, prominently displayed, beer fabric, and inspiration struck.

I started with a 12 inch square of just the beer fabric, and surrounded it with a 1.5 inch border of gold dupioni silk (from a pillowcase I had made years before which had fallen apart). On the border I sewed beer bottle caps, as many and as varied as I was able to collect from Mr. Beadgirl's beers. For the next border I wanted fabric that said, over and over, "No TV and no beer make [Mr. Beadgirl] go crazy," a modification of a Homer Simpson line which is itself a parody of a line from the Shining. To do that, I ironed plain white fabric onto the shiny side of freezer paper, and cut out 8.5 by 11 sheets and fed them into the printer, printed out pages filled with the line, and removed the backing. That wasn't interesting enough, however, so I then stained the fabric with coffee (I tried to get coffee rings, but the fabric was too absorbent), then layered on torn up bits of documents from Mr. Beadgirl's work (including, as he was amused to notice, the Securities Act of 1933) which I attached with 3 coats of Modge Podge. I wanted to get the idea of papers layered on top of his "state of mind" as they are layered on his desk, but between the lack of time and the need to make sure no confidential client information made it into the quilt I had to settle for torn scraps. I backed the quilt with heavy black dupioni and then quilted the center square (which was a royal pain -- the silk backing didn't move well). Because of the Modge Podge and the uncooperative backing I gave up on quilting the outer border, and simply tied it with a few scattered crystal beads. With a few late nights I was able to finish it in time for our anniversary last week.

Mr. Beadgirl loves it.