using batiks in a quilt

When a client mentioned he wanted a quilt with a horse theme for his wife, I practically yelled out yeehah! Well, I was a little more professional than that but I had been designing a western style quilt in my mind’s eye for years and this was the opportunity to finally make it come to life. Oh, and what an opportunity to dive into my batik stash which is overflowing with every color imaginable. I jumped right in and pulled out stacks and stacks of batiks – OMG I had to tell myself to focus on only a few colorways… brown, blue and green. In the end, I sneaked in a few more colors -purples, reds and oranges!

I had such a blast laying out strip after strip, starting with the blues down to the light browns and yellows, to create a western landscape with silhouettes of beautiful horses against a sunset. It felt like I was painting with fabric!

Throughout the layout process, I daydreamed about how I was going to machine quilt it. The design didn’t come until it was fully loaded on the Gammill, and I sat for about an hour debating on the complexity of the design. It definitely needed to be simple with lots of movement without taking away from the beautiful batiks. I ended up quilting a simple overall swirl throughout the background and focused more on enhancing the horse blocks.