Happy Birthday to My Hubby Bear!

Today is my husband's birthday, and for the last 4 months I have been working on a quilt for him. Finally I can reveal it!

The thought for the quilt was bears since that is a nickname I have for him. I found this great "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" fabric at the quilt store and started off with that as my basis for the quilt. Of course, I had to make a "bear claw" pattern for the corners so this was the first block:

After making the four corners, I started to think about the rest of the blocks and the center. I came up with a heart to encircle two bears. Then I found this amazing pattern for pine trees:
I started thinking about bears and how Ursa major and minor were some of the first constellations that I learned about. So that got me thinking about stars, and I found this very cool star pattern that was sort of easy to piece. It just took cutting up and sewing together lots of triangles. And then since I was an expert at triangles, it was no stretch to put together four pairs and make pinwheels to complete the sides. From there it was just piecing the borders, putting together the backing, and sewing everything together. It turned out to be rather large (about 106 x 106 inches) and will look nice when we get a queen sized bed as the sides will just drape over.

Whew! I'm really going to need a bigger quilting sewing machine if I am going to keep doing this.... I included a slide show of all the different parts. Enjoy!

p.s. yes, I made the stuffed bear at the top of the page as well and included it in his birthday box