Farmer's Fancy

Yes it's true I have a love affair with fabric.  AppleJack says I will buy fabric before I will buy food.  Not true, I also love to eat good food.  Yesterday, when I posted about backing fabric for some of my projects several asked questions about the fabric for Harry Tyler's lion.  The fabric for Harry Tyler's lion is manufactured by Windham Fabrics and the fabric line is called Farmer's Fancy.  The inspiration for this line of fabrics came from The National Museum of American Coverlets.  For more information about Farmer's Fancy by Windham read here.

The Harry Tyler lion fabric really caught by eye the first time I saw it at the quilt shop, I purchased the fabric in both the red and blue.  I used the red fabric as the backing fabric for my bow tie quilt and I will be using the blue fabric as the backing fabric for Harry Tyler's lion designed by The Heartstring Samplery.  Beth at Heartstring Samplery also drew inspiration from the Harry Tyler coverlet from The American Coverlet Museum and she writes a brief account and history.

This is the red version of Farmer's Fancy Harry Tyler's lion.  I used this on the bow tie quilt.  The fabric is 44-45" wide, I matched the design and sewed the two pieces of fabric together so it would look like one piece of fabric.  By doing this, it makes the quilt reversible and when I tire of looking at red bow ties, I can turn it over and it looks like a coverlet.  With a repeating pattern, there is always some waste.  I was glad there was some left over fabric so I can use it in other projects.  Grandmother Bessie drilled waste not, want not into my head.

I used this Farmer's Fancy fabric for the backing fabric on the Patriotic HST quilt.  Again, I matched the design and sewed the fabric together to look like one piece of fabric making the quilt reversible.  

More Farmer's Fancy--Betty, the awesome finisher, fussy cut the fabric to match part of the design on the front.  The colors in the fabric perfectly match the colors on the front.

This is the blue which I will be using for the backing on Harry Tyler's lion.  I have some ideas floating in my head thinking I can make this piece look like a small reversible coverlet for a doll bed.

There are more designs in the Farmer's Fancy fabric line at the quilt shop which I have not purchased but think they are really pretty and would work well in either a quilt or for backing fabric.  Hope this information is helpful and I hope I can sweet talk AppleJack into driving me to the quilt shop for more fabric.