Tuesday, March 04, 2025

Putting together the Cowboy quilt and other updates

Hi and welcome back! I couldn't wait until Thursday to post these updates since I wanted to make the Table Scraps Challenge and my March One Monthly Goal (OMG) deadlines. As well, I'll be out of town for a few days and have extended last week's Free Motion Maverick's party for a week. Please keep linking up there 😍

Planning the Cowboy panel

This is what the Cowboy panel looks like so far. I have just one block left to make.

Cowboy panel so far

After the kite block, I knew that I wanted to make several appliqué blocks. I found this lovely free children's pattern, Home on the Range (see Related links below). It's got lovely appliqués of a cowboy hat, boot, cactus and horse shoe. Perfect! I dipped into my hand-dyed fabric and found everything I needed. Here are the three blocks I made.

Cowboy hat and boot

Two cacti

Horse shoe with horse and dog

I didn't add any borders around them - I'll wait and see how things look as I put the quilt together. I've decided to add a very narrow medium brown border around the panel and then use a slightly lighter brown around the blocks. This way I can add whatever spacer I need to make the blocks fit.

Here's what those fabrics look like on my design wall.

Proposed narrow border
and spacer fabric

February's Blue Table Scraps Challenge

and March's One Monthly Goal

I started playing with blue scraps in early February in anticipation of the TSC. I got to a piece about 24" square before it was no longer fun (it's good to know our limits! 😁) I had no idea what to make - I have enough placemats etc. and didn't want it to be complicated. I settled on a baby quilt (as opposed to a cuddle quilt) since I have a baby quilt to FMQ for our guild. That reasoning doesn't make as much sense to me as it did back then, but oh well....

Here it is. It's coming along well.

Blue baby quilt so far

After doing the stitch-in-the-ditch, I FMQ some wavy water lines at the top of the quilt. I also hid a few fishes in the water.

I then quilted the outside background area of the top part of the quilt. Then I FMQ between the blue scrappy line areas. It was a lot of fun 😊 I'm hoping to add a few hidden images in the FMQ, like the fish. That will make the quilt more interesting for the recipient.

A closeup of the FMQ area

The back of the quilt - stitched-in-the-ditch and FMQ

What I learned

I've had a lot of fun making the blocks for the SAHRR and I don't want to stop - otherwise I'll end up with two more UFOs!
I'll be working on the Cowboy panel first since it's going to a cute little boy who is growing very quickly!
I have no idea how large it'll be - it will be as large as it needs to be!
I do want to get the Christmas panel quilt pieced by the end of March. It probably won't be quilted for the final SAHRR party....but you never know! Life could get boring again! 😂
I didn't think that I could get bored stitching scraps together so it must be that it was all one colour and one large piece.
I cut the scrappy pieces and added the strips between the turquoise background. Since it's scrappy, I was able to add small pieces to the ends of the strips to make them a little longer.
I don't often worry about the size of my scrappy quilts but this is supposed to be 36" x 40" since it's for the guild. That's considered a child's quilt.