Dad's Air Force Quilt

I was able to fly out to Ohio for my dad's retirement ceremony. He's been serving his country for fifty years--twenty years active duty Air Force, and thirty years in civil service. My sister Barb had the idea to make this quilt for him. There wasn't time to piece it, so she called me up and told me what she had in mind, and asked if I could design something digitally and we could get it printed. I put the background together with gelli prints, and created the plane silhouettes in Adobe Illustrator. These are the three main airplanes that he worked on--the T-6, C-17, and F-35.



Barb wanted fifty stars around the border, and I thought they would look good on a background of smaller stars. I made some gelli prints and scanned them.



I made a large star stamp and stamped it with acrylic paint on fabric to get the texture I wanted.



I scanned the stars and made them into Photoshop brushes to put around the border.



Barb and I went back and forth with the image a few times to make sure everything was just right, and then I sent the completed file to Pattern Jam. They printed it out on fabric and sent it to Barb.



Barb put it together and quilted it on her longarm machine. The printing turned out great (the red came out a little more orange than I was expecting), and Barb did a fabulous job with the quilting.



Barb is a longarm artiste!



Presenting the quilt to Dad.



Barb said, "It will keep you warm while you take naps."

It was a really lovely ceremony. Peter sang the national anthem (first and fourth verses, by request), and did a great job. Everyone had lots of nice things to say about Dad.



After the ceremony we had a receiving line. Kirsten sat out most of it. The rest of us thought it would be funny to line up by height.



Betsey and Barb were up late the night before making fudge. I did the labels. I hear it was quite tasty. I think they're still eating that cake.

Barb was the only one who came out with her whole family--Peter and I left ours at home. Our Cousin Mark came from Indiana, and we all had a fun couple of days together. We played some games and ate Korean food and made inappropriate jokes about making fudge.

Congratulations, Dad!