I have been tackling several categories of fabric in my stash over the last couple of years during the pandemic. It’s given me focus, and it’s allowed me to work through the collection I’ve accrued over the years.
One category that seems like it grows instead of shrinks is the western fabric collection. I didn’t realize how much I had, and there are so many sub-categories. I already finished a beautiful log cabin in dusty blues and pinks, and now it was time to pull some classics together.
The back story to these blocks is that I had a fat quarter with these adorable horse faces on it. The horses each had names, and I immediately knew I wanted to fussy cut them for this quilt.
The trick was that I wasn’t working with a very large cut, and the faces were all pretty close together. I did the best I could to get the horses and their names in the frames, and had to be content with how they turned out.
Now that I knew how many blocks I was working with, I decided on a layout. Because of the uneven number I needed to be creative. I didn’t want to leave any of them out. I chose to do three columns and incorporated some more of my western fabrics to make the flying geese frames in two rows and the solid churn dash blocks down the middle.
I like that all the colors have a bit of a “weathered” look to them, adding to the feel of a western quilt. The back is much bolder with cowboys roping angry bulls, and kicking up dust. I admit that I am trying to use up this fabric on backings because the pattern is so big. But it’s a fun fabric and a great use for it.
I kept the quilting simple with twists, similar to the rope that the cowboy is spinning on the white background fabric. I just meandered across the quilt to keep things simple. I finished the quilt with a tag and a binding with a brown and black fabric.
This quilt didn’t end up very big because I was so limited on the fabric that it’s centered around. That’s okay, it’ll make a great baby quilt for a little buckaroo. After I finished this quilt, I was sorting through my mom’s fabric and found another fat quarter of the horse faces with the names. Oh man! I could have made this bigger! Oh well, it’s too late now, and I have a super cute finish.
