Galloping Horses Quilt

My sister-in-law loves horses and for her Christmas present I made her a quilt! My favorite part about putting a quilt together is getting 1 – 3 main/focal fabrics, then building out the rest of the palate from other fabric lines. I like to challenge myself with the array of colors and prints that are out there to choose from. I spent a good hour and a half selecting my fabric and ensuring the final placement didn’t clash with each other.

For this quilt, we selected 3 focus prints from Windham Fabrics Wild Field collection by Dinara Mirtalipova. The pattern of choice is Cotton + Steel’s Mustang Quilt by Melody Miller, which you can grab for free, here! Perfect opportunity to fussy cut the horse fabric and add lots of vibrant colors. Just to warn you, if you decide to save this free pattern, there are some cutting instruction errors. I should have written them all down to share, but I’ve been on a mission to complete this quilt in time for Christmas. Honestly, there were some frustrating moments with this pattern, that I don’t think I would re-use it unless I wanted to go through and make all the corrections. Also, piecing on the diagonal causes a lot of stretch to the quilt that I had some issues with the HST borders. The stretch caused my borders to not match up, because of this, I did not use them. Instead, I used solid white borders. which still caused some fabric bunching! In the end, I had to remove some of my quilting to allow for some slack for the borders. After I wash and dried the quilt, I went over an re-quilted where I had removed the stitches. Due to the shrinkage, you could no longer see where my borders were bunching before. Whew!

For the back, I found this adorable fleece fabric of galloping horses. It was wide enough to get a full back, which required no piecing. I quilted on the diagonal for a quick and easy solution; a cross-hatch effect. Finally, Moda Fabric’s Rustic Weave in purple finished the quilt off for the binding.