Sunrise, Sunset
Hello! Today I’m writing a little bit about this quilt I designed, pieced, and quilted that I like to call Sunrise, Sunset. This was the first quilt I had designed using EQ8 design software and my first quilt I had loaded on my longarm!
This quilt is primarily constructed with batik fabrics and made almost entirely out of 4”x2” flying geese blocks. The original design on EQ8 didn’t have the curved “rolling hills” sections included with it, but I just needed this thing to be bigger than what had. As a quilt designer, I tend to add, remove, or change things as I go along like I think most of us probably do. My quilts rarely end up how they are intended to be from the start!
I started this quilt at the beginning of the pandemic and finally got it done about a year later. I had finished piecing the top in a matter of a couple of months, but wasn’t sure how I wanted to quilt it. By that time all of the quilting I had done had been free-motion on my semi-industrial JukiTL-2010q on smaller pieces, but I knew I wanted this to be quilted either on a longarm or on the giant “full-frame” quilting machine I operated at work, so it just sat around collecting dust for 9 or 10 months while I took my sweet time deciding what to do with it. Something in my gut told me I’d be a proud owner of a longarm quilting machine sometime in my life which is why I think I hesitated.
Fast forward to the spring of 2021. After months of basement renovations and internal dialogue and debates with my own brain on whether or not I should get a longarm, I got a longarm! After a few runs on some practice quilt sandwiches I decided it was time to quilt this sucker!
I ultimately decided to use the digital pantograph called Fusion designed by Patricia E. Ritter for this quilt. I’m not gonna to lie, I ended up using this pattern after I unpicked the first row of quilting using different patterns twice before. The first time I used a pattern I didn’t end up liking on this particular quilt, and the second time was my attempt at custom quilting which is very hard when the frame isn’t balanced correctly! I ended up fixing balancing issue after this quilt, but I’m so glad I ended up using the pattern I did!
I love what this pattern adds to the quilt. The curvy, echoed lines gives a nice contrast to the rigid straight-edged “mountains”, and gives the quilt just the right amount of movement to remind me of the crisp, breezy coastal mountain air I miss so much from the Midwest.
I’ll also add that this is one of the first quilts I’ve ever made that I’ve kept to myself! I used an organic bamboo batting which gives it a great drape and is just so nice to snuggle up in! In fact, I’m going to go do that now. Thanks so much for reading!
