Blogger's Quilt Festival: Large Quilt

"Wild Mustangs of the Painted Desert" is my entry for the Large Quilt category in the Blogger's Quilt Festival. You can find the festival here:

And here's my quilt entry:

You can find the pattern for this quilt here, but I did make some major changes. Let me tell you this quilt's story. It started with the Painted Desert fabric being on sale at my LQS. I loved it and I wanted it, but I wanted to know what I would use it for so I could make sure I bought enough of each fabric for the purpose. That's the native prints I used in this quilt - the background, the backing, the first border and binding, and the red fabric used in the pattern of this quilt top. I bought the horse print separately for a different quilt, but didn't end up using it. And then I found that awesome border print, which I just had to have... Then I started googling. You know how fabric companies will often offer free quilt patterns to use their fabric in. That's how I found the Wild Horses quilt pattern and decided it was the pattern I would use the Painted Desert fabric in, along with the all-over horse print and the horse border print. I bought sufficient fabric to make the quilt and stored it away for a future project. I actually planned on making it for the rec room in my basement. 

Then one day I found out that a dear older couple in my church, who had been like parents to me and supported me through some tough times, were moving to BC. It was pretty depressing news, but I knew I needed to make them a quilt. And since they are horse lovers, the Wild Mustang quilt would be the most appropriate for them  I can always make a different quilt for my rec room, but I will never have this opportunity to celebrate my friendship in this way again. And they were quite thrilled with it.

In considering the construction of this quilt, I opted to increase the size of the basic square unit and not to use half-square triangles. When I'm using a large print fabric, I like to use large pieces so that you can get the full benefit of the print. So I opted for parallelograms instead. For those of you who don't remember your geometry terms, this is a parallelogram:

Squares and parallelograms, but not HSTs made up this quilt top. And LOTS of Y-seams! Here's the centre star:

And I just kept on going, adding more pieces to the centre.

And finally, here's the back of the quilt:

And by the way, I really don't know if there are wild mustangs in the Painted Desert, but it sounded good.