Ride 'Em, Cowgirl!

This is a work in progress (near completion, though!).  It is a LONG overdue housewarming gift for my tax office buddy, Faith, who left us to move back to her home state of Wyoming -- and then came back to Nebraska last Fall.  Now, Faith is cowgirl, through and through.  And she LOVES rodeos.  


When she moved back to Nebraska, I offered to sew her a housewarming gift.  After some thought, she decided she would like a fleece throw.  But here's the kicker (bad pun) -- she wanted a bucking horse on it!
I had all tax season to ponder how I was going to pull this off.  But now it is over two months since the end of tax season, and she would like to take it along to the 4th of July rodeo in Wyoming.  


Drawing is not my strong suit.  I gave up trying to draw a horse to size (about 24 inches), and worked on a smaller image, then took it to Kinko's, and paid them to enlarge it.  The front leg is a little fat, and the head may be a bit too long, but it looks like a horse--sort of.  


That big paper horse sat on the table in my girl cave for QUITE awhile before I finally got the nerve to applique it -- fleece on fleece.

Any of you who sew know that fleece is a bit stretchy -- and putting two layers of stretchy on top of one another is double stretchy.  I knew I needed to control the stretch to avert disaster.  So I used fusible interfacing to stabilize the edges of the big brown fleece horse (using muslin as a pressing cloth to prevent possible melting of the fleece), and I used a layer of tear-away stabilizer under the yellow fleece layer, then I zig-zagged with a very wide and fairly tight stitch all the way around. It's not perfect, but I think it will hold:

You can sort of see what I'm talking about in this closeup of the horse's a__  , uh - I mean, pony tail.

Now all I need to do is layer the gold fleece and another piece of brown fleece right sides together.  Sew all the way around (using my walking foot) except for an opening to turn it right side out.  Slip stitch the opening by hand. Make sure it's squared up.  Then topstitch about in inch from the knife edge.  I'll probably add one or two more rows (spaced sort of like a double-matted picture frame):  1" from the edge,  probably 3" from the first row of topstitching, and then a final row, maybe 3/4" or so from the second row of topstitching.  I'm hoping I won't need to topstitch around the horse.  I REALLY want to get this done before the weekend.


I sent Faith the photos.  She likes it :-).  She can't wait to show her cowgirl buddies back in Wyoming.

TTFN
LeAnn aka pasqueflower
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