SALT LAKE CITY — Benson Boone just got a new, quilted vest, courtesy of one Utah woman who some are saying made the “perfect throw.”
While at the concert on Thursday night at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, Chelsea Porter was standing near the stage when Boone motioned to her, and that’s when she knew it was her cue to throw the hand-quilted vest. The moment, caught on video and viewed over 1 million times, shows Boone catching the vest and swapping out his red one for the one Porter made.
“Did you hand-make this?” Boone said to Porter in front of the entire audience. “You hand-made … you quilted this. You’re a quilter. I like it.”
Porter, who had floor tickets to the concert, is seen smiling ear-to-ear as Boone makes his way down to the audience to give her a hug, wearing his new vest, which he ends up wearing for the rest of his set.
“He gave me a hug and talked to me and he knew what a quilter was,” Porter, who lives in northern Utah, said. “A lot of people would say the wrong thing, like, ‘you knitted this.’ A lot of people don’t know the difference, so the fact that he was like ‘You’re a quilter,’ was just awesome. I’m just on cloud nine, absolutely.”
The making of the vest was something that was planned, and Porter brought her social media followers along with her in the process, from picking the material, to sewing and even testing it out while flipping on a trampoline to make sure that it was stage-ready. She said that when it came down to the night of the concert, and it all went as planned, it was a dream come true.
“I truly believed that I could do it. I really did,” she said. “I manifested the crap out of this, so I really believed it could happen. I was not doubting that it would happen, but at the same time, there are no guarantees. It was just like this whole experiment of, we’re going to make this. I’m gonna give it everything I’ve got. I’m going to do everything in my power to get it to him.
“At the end of the day, if he doesn’t get it, I’m going to have a really cool souvenir from my experience, so you know, whatever happens, happens. I had my friends shake signs with me and peddling that vest as best I could. To have Benson actually receive it, put it on and model it and then perform the rest of his set in it, blew me away.”
A mom with a dream
As the excitement of the events that day will inevitably start to settle and become a memory, behind it all is a mom with a dream. Porter, who is a mom of three young boys, spoke candidly to KSL.com about how simply being able to find her niche in this big world has taken some time and a lot of tears.
Chelsea Porter, of northern Utah, models the quilted vest she sewed for Benson Boone before the concert in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Oct. 9. (Photo: chelsea_b_porter, Instagram)
“I’ve been dabbling in social media for years, and I’ve been trying to do different things and I just never found my right niche,” she said. “After my last baby, I was really in the depths of postpartum — like it was a bad postpartum time for me. … I was just not in a good place and I started this little bitty TikTok and I had like 250 followers. Every year, I make my neighbors Christmas gifts, and one year I was making what I call a Bowl Cozy, and people wanted to buy them. I ended up selling 150 of them, and I decided to put a tutorial on my TikTok to see what happens, and all of a sudden, my sewing … it just took off.
“I’ve been sewing my whole life and it never occurred to me that other people would be interested in it,” Porter continued. “Sewing is just such a passion for me. It’s like a safe place — a warm hug, you know. When I’m feeling down or whatever, it kind of grounds me and. So it’s just now taken off and it’s really fun because it’s opened all these avenues for me.”
Porter said many have asked her what’s next, now that one of the most famous singers has adorned one of her creations onstage, and she said that she just wants to keep doing what she loves and share it with others.
“It’s been fun to share my passion (for sewing) with the world because my grandma first taught me how to sew when I was little,” Porter said. “She’s the reason that I started and I got my passion and encouragement from her. … I think one of the reasons it’s been so easy to share on the internet is because I’m not a professionally trained seamstress; I’m just a mom and I want to show everyone that you can do it and WE can do it.”
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.