Cowboy Stars Quilt

What can I say about western fabric, I just love it! I love the colors, and the patterns, and the ranch life style it portrays. The bummer about this is, I don’t actually make a ton of western quilts.

 

My mom went through her stash to do a major cleanout and I came home with even more of these beautiful cuts. I made a wonderful log cabin with one batch, and a fussy-cut baby quilt with some more. But with more still to work with, I decided to try making some stars.

 

I started with some small stars. I wasn’t sure what my plan was or what I was going to do with the stars, but it was fun to make these small stars… at first.

I quickly realized this was going to take a long time. I also realized I needed to incorporate more colors, and more sizes. I went through all of the fabrics that I thought would work well in this project. Then I broke them up into pairs; a dark and a light.

 I made sets of stars in the colors and broke all of the stars into dark and light piles. Then I just randomly matched stars together and started sewing pairs. Once the pairs were together, I made bigger stars and sewed all that together. I tried to be as random and unintentional as I could be, which is super hard for me.

 

Getting all of the stars put together was a challenge, but I was super happy with the random look of the finished product. It felt like it needed something to frame it, and to make the top a little bigger, so I added a navy strip and then some of the blue from the stars.

 

The backing is my attempt to use up the random large fabric pieces I have left from previous backings. It’s really a fun theme with wildwest cowboys wrangling up the longhorn bulls. It’s a very large print that is lost when cut into small pieces. But it looks super cool as a backing. I didn’t have enough so I countered it with a grey striped fabric.

 Once again, I did a basic meander for this quilt. The scrappy nature seemed to be perfect for that type of quilting. I had some pink fabric left over from the top of the quilt and I used that for the binding. I finished it with a label and called it done. The cats were pleased, but I’m thinking it will be perfect for our bed in the camper.

 

 I was so happy to get to use up a bunch of the western fabrics I’ve collected for so many years. I still have a ton to go, so hopefully there will be more western quilts in the future.