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Thursday, November 17, 2011


This is a quilt top I made for our younger granddaughter, who absolutely loves horses.  It's still a UFO--I really need to get it to a quilter soon, before she outgrows her infatuation with equines.  I found the wonderful Laurel Burch fabric on eBay a few years ago.  The only problem was, the horse's eyes looked like human eyes, with white all around them, which was remarkably creepy.  So I used brown Pigma pens to color in around the irises.  It seemed to take forever, but the horses looked a lot better with horse eyes than with human ones.  Then there was the issue of the fabrics being directional.  That meant the horse pieces and the light strips with the tiny green horses had to be cut carefully, and in different directions, to make the design work.  A friend had made a quilt in this pattern, and I took a good look at it to see how it was done, so that I'd be able to make one like it when I got home.


I haven't done a lot with colored pens in the past to change my fabrics, but I can see how it could really work for me in doing designs.  I've been thinking about the quilting for this particular quilt.  I think it would look nice with clouds moving over the surface.  I may send it to a fellow member of Treadleon who lives in the DFW area (that's Dallas/Ft. Worth for non-Texans).  He has a very nice longarm machine, and reasonable prices.  I never want to spend too much on a quilt for the under 10 kids.  It's going to live a hard life, poor thing.

2 comments:

  1. How many pens did you go through coloring the eyes? Your remark about using colored pens in designs was a light bulb for me. I may have to look at my stash!

    I'm starting to warm up to doing actually trying to quilt. I'm seeing that UFO's aren't the waste that sewing garment and knitting project UFOs can be (pattern pieces/directions get misplaced, you just forget where you were, etc.) I also never considered the fact that I could pay someone else to quilt the tops.

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  2. Oh, yes, we like to say there are three ways to quilt--by hand, by machine, and by checkbook. :)

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