Bright Sun Medallion Quilting Design

Is the sun out and shining for you today? Right now we have a soft blue sky, gentle breeze, and a hint of spring in the air.

But even if the sun isn’t shining in your neck of the woods, you can now make it shine anywhere on your quilts with this Sun Medallion!

Sun Medallion Quilting Design

I’ve been trying to create a sun design since the beginning of the project, but every time I tried, it just turned into a mess of triangles shooting in all directions.

This time I focused just on creating a good base of 16 points and then just expanded and echoed them out to the edges. The end result is much easier to stitch and much more interesting looking too!

Difficulty Level – Advanced. This is a fairly tricky design. I rarely say this, but in this situation I think this design is probably easier to stitch by marking it, rather than free handing the design.

Maybe just start by marking the core 8 points and the 8 more points in between. Once you get this area stitched, it’s a simple process of travel stitching around the points, echoing them one by one.

Design Family – Center Fill. This design works by starting in the center and working your way to the outside. It’s a simple way to create a quick flower design anywhere on your quilt.

Directional Texture – Center Focused. You can’t escape the blasting, center filled texture of this design! Definitely place it where you want lots of eye catching attention.

Suggestions for Use – Guess what I finished up last night?! My Flower Bouquet Quilt!

Now that I’ve finished this, I can’t wait to make another one. I have a feeling this pattern is going to be extremely addictive. Maybe for the next one I’ll use Sun Medallion as a flower and play with different colored threads in the next one….heading into the studio to start picking out fabrics now!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day

LeahDay

Leah Day has been teaching online since 2009. She's the creator of the Free Motion Quilting Project, a blog filled with thousands of quilting tutorial videos. Leah has written several books including 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs, Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day, and Mally the Maker and the Queen in the Quilt.

5 Responses

  1. Nina Paley says:

    I love the Flower Bouquet quilt, especially the "frame." How big is the whole thing?

  2. Leah Day says:

    Thanks Nina! The finished quilt is around 22" x 29", but you could easily make it bigger by simply expanding the borders. On the next one I make I'm planning to use 5 inch borders so I have more room to play.

    Cheers,

    Leah

  3. Rachel says:

    Very nice. It will be a while before my skill level is up to this challenge, but thanks for the inspiration!

  4. debbie says:

    Your vase quilt turned out so cute! I like the idea of making the background lighter (like the pale blue sky where you live) and using varigated thread for the flowers. Are varigated threads a problem when doing a lot of travel stitching? Would it be better if I used a thread that didn't have too many colors in it? for example one that had just pink and yellow (with orange where it changed colors), rather than one that had all of the colors?

  5. Nana B says:

    Love this one!! How do you come up with all of these – amazing!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *