happy new year, a quick quilt top

[Note, I will be back filling this blog with posts "written" at the time the projects were actually done, I will be writing now but my sensibilities are much more satisfied with backdating them. There's been a few things since 2021, but not a whole lot to catch up on until quite a bit this past year, so I think it's not too crazy to do this. For now, I am actually starting to write real-time again in January 2025 because I have found the mental space to miss it.]

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I can't quite believe how happy I am with this project. The fact that so many of my quilts-in-waiting are now finished (minus one) has really lifted weight off my mind and allowed my creative juices to start swirling around big projects again. 

I have had most of the fabrics I used for this quilt sitting together in a stack for a long time. I knew I wanted to use them together, I just did not know how. Those mustang prints from Melody Miller are large scale and I have struggled to imagine cutting into them and losing most of the "fun" I get from the pattern. I like that they are horses running together - having a random ear or head in a half square triangle block or something like that just wouldn't do it for me. There's also a great print from Sarah Watts called Horseback which, appropriately, has sketches of horses with bright saddle pads on the perfect greenish blue. Note for the interested, it's the Honeymoon line for Cotton + Steel (just in case it ever gets re-released, I'll remember what it is from this note). Regardless, a special collection over time for sure. I had a hankering to play with these fabrics now that my table and mind are clear, and so I just started laying them out and adding a few more leftovers of prints that I thought might play nicely. 

I was binging on some Missouri Star Quilt Co. tutorials on YouTube while all of this was going on, and one of the projects that came up was a slant rhyme to a coin quilt. While coin quilts are usually smaller strips, this Simple Stacks quilt was stacks of 5"x10" cuts of fabric, ideal for large prints. I didn't buy the pattern, but the great thing about those videos is it gives you the gist of the pattern well enough for a person who has quilted a bunch to be able to do it on your own. I did watch the tutorial a few times to absorb what was going on, and then I committed to cutting out some big bricks of fabric. I adjusted the size to be more amenable to the fat quarter and half yard cuts I had, and away I went. 

It didn't take long, maybe a couple of evenings, to get all of the fabric cut. I used as much of my stack of curated fabrics as I could and then augmented with some Anna Maria Horner scraps and one mustard tree fabric that I don't remember the origins of. It matches those mustard mustangs pretty perfectly. I was doing math on the fly to see how many bricks I would need and about how large the quilt would end up being. My goals were to have something that would use up fabric and be proportional, so I was pretty much making it up as I went along. In terms of fabric placement, I resisted the usual impulse I have to be deliberate. I made myself improvise a bit and just try not to put things near each other that were too similar. And guess what? I didn't die. And it looks great.

In digging through my cabinet for fabric to use for sashing, I found leftovers from an all-white jelly roll that was hiding in the back. What. A. Gift. It was so easy to just piece a bunch together and go to town on sashing the thing. By the time I was done, it was tempting to leave it without more of a border, which is what I usually do. The "modern" look of no borders is generally appealing to me. But. I laid it out on my bed and it was so close to being the perfect size to drape nicely over the sides of my mattress that I decided to go for it. The teal linen was leftover from my shot cotton quilt and I found a floral print that I remember buying yardage of thinking "I'll use this as a quilt back, or something. It's on sale and it's pretty.". I debated adding the more 'traditional' looking fabric with the more tribal/geometric mix I had, but it actually worked out pretty great since there were a few florals thrown in there anyway. Mixing the two also makes it feel a bit more bohemian to me, which I like. 

I'm really proud of how it all works together without having been a designer's collection. How did I have all of these great things in my stash?? The top measures 84"x96" and it's going to be epic. I'm pretty sure I will finish it on my machine with the wavy preset stitch pattern. I'm not sure what thread color to use yet, but I have some time to mull it over because I don't have a great backing fabric at the moment. It took me just under a week to work this up, and it feels like a great way to start this year's creative adventures.