Project Quilting 17.3: Year of the Horse

Project Quilting Challenge 17.3 invites participants to find inspiration from the upcoming Lunar New Year which is the Year of the Horse. 2026 will be the Year of the Fire Horse which occurs every 60 years and symbolizes the Horse's independent nature with Fire's intensity, leading to rapid, transformative, and sometimes chaotic changes which seems appropriate given the chaos of the world, especially here in the United States.

Earlier this year, I made a set of Year of the Fire Horse Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) featuring a horse-themed postage stamp set against a fiery background collaged with printed papers.

For this week's challenge, I stuck with the ATC format (2.5" x 3.5") while carving a horseshoe stamp on Thursday and conducting multiple test prints on silver/metallic wallpaper samples for use with  a future set of ATCs. Horseshoes serve as a foretelling of good fortune to come and they protect against misfortune. They symbolize good luck, prosperity, and protection. I have a hunch I will be printing lots of horseshoes for the year ahead!

Saturday evening, I used my tabletop printing press to print two horseshoes onto a silver metallic fabric swatches using a Jet Black Ranger Archival inkpad. While I was tempted to print a few more horseshoes, that would mean more time to finish them into quilted ATCs...so I showed great restraint with just these two prints!

The prints were backed with Pellon 805 Wonder Under fusible before triming out each horseshoe. I found a few fiery fabric swatches in my stash for potential backgrounds. Here I am conducting auditions which were pretty brief as there was a clear winner for me that captured fire and helped the silver horseshoe to pop!

Each ATC was layered with a heavyweight stabilizer and backed with a fiery scrap of quilting fabric. The horseshoes were fused into place and topstitched. Skinny blue painter's tape was used to outline the 2.5" x 3.5" ATC perimeter with two passes of stitching.

Each card was trimmed just a hair or two beyond the perimeter stitching and the edges were finished with a dark grey Tulip Dimensional Fabric Paint before propping up onto a spool of thread to allow the paint to air dry.

Here are all fabrics and supplies used to create this pair of Year of the Fire Horse ATCs. 

The recipient can decide which orientation to display their ATC. A horseshoe hung facing up serves as a vessel to collect and keep good luck from falling out whereas displaying it facing downwards indoors means that good luck will pour out over the home and those within it.

Year of the Fire Horse ATCs, Each Finishes 2.5" x 3.5"

I couldn't resist using a few of the fabric scraps to create a tiny fiery horseshoe for my Circle of the Day!

Happy Lunar New Year with the Year of the Fire Horse starting on February 17th, 2026. And cheers to everyone who started and finished a Year of the Horse project this week as part of Project Quilting 17.3!