By OLIVER GOOD

Staff writer

After posting a picture of an original quilt design on social media, Sew What Quilt Shop has taken orders from quilters in California, Texas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Oregon.

“We’ve never had this much interest in anything we have put on Facebook,” co-owner Carol Riggs said Thursday.

The basic “License to Shop” pattern was hand-drawn by her sister and shop co-owner, Paula Perry. It consists of an outline of a Volkswagen Beetle with buttons for taillights, a window, and space below to display collectable fabric license plate designs.

The license plates are a separate design created another quilting business called Zebra Patterns.

The kit features nine cars framed in a three-by-three square arrangement, separated by a grid of black fabric strips crafted to resemble a series of roadways. Each car is a different color and stitched onto a white background.

“Our pattern was really created as a venue for the license plates,” Riggs said.

While Perry and Riggs were brainstorming ways to display the license plates, they decided on a VW bug because it was a cute pattern and easy to reproduce by hand.

“It’s been kind of crazy,” Perry said. “We sold out of all the pattern kits we originally made.”

As of Monday, Sew What had sold 48 pattern orders, Riggs said. They have to seek an outside printing option rather than just tracing from the master design.

“Quilters love to collect things like buttons or anything unusual,” Riggs said. “But sometimes they don’t know what to do with all that stuff. The design is just a way for them to display their collection.”

Riggs said one caller joked that her kids might “beat each other silly playing slug-bug” when she hangs her quilt up on the wall.