How to Quilt Rise and Shine, Design #499
Sunshines are one of my favorite symbols to use on quilts because my last name is Day and I love the idea of adding more light and creativity to my quilts. Learn how you can add a touch of sunshine to all your quilts with this Rise and Shine design:
I use a lot of different quilting tools to make free motion quilting easier on my home machine. On my hands I wear quilting gloves that help give me better control over where the quilt is going and the size of my stitches.
On the machine I placed a Queen Supreme Slider, a slippery Teflon sheet to help the quilt slide easily over the surface. I am using Isacord white thread in the top and bobbin of the machine. I find using the same thread in the top and bobbin reduces tension issues and prevents little dots of different colors showing up on the right or wrong side of the quilt.
I am quilting on the Eversewn Sparrow 20, a small affordable sewing machine that I think is perfect for basic sewing and quilting and also a terrific travel machine if you are needing something lighter to take to workshops.
Now let’s learn more about Rise and Shine!
Design Family – Echoing. This design is stitched with a series of rules you can memorize to repeat the design over your quilt. I group designs with similar steps into families to make them easier to understand. If you can quilt one Echoing Design, chances are you can quilt all of them.
If you’d like to build some skill for Rise and Shine first, try quilting Echo Shell and Echo Daisy first. The steps to this design are simple: stitch a half to quarter circle shape, echo that shape close to the first line of stitching.
Then travel stitch and leave a wide gap between that first set of lines and echo again, this time leaving a lot of space between the lines. Echo one more time closely, then travel stitch inside the open space and fill that area with pointy lines. This gives soft curves the jagged sunshine effect.
Difficulty Level – Intermediate. Rise and Shine isn’t super challenging, but it is a precision-oriented design. It requires being able to stitch the shapes, hit the line, travel stitch and consistently echo the curving lines lines.
If you’re working on building this skills, this is a great design to practice with! Fill a fat quarter sized practice sandwich and you’ll get the hang of the design and get lots of practice on precision quilting, travel stitching and echoing.
Suggestions for Use – Rise and Shine will work anywhere on your quilts and you can quilt it on any scale, or size. I personally think this would look amazing stitched on a large-scale with free motion couching. I’d love to see the bright sunshine shapes fill in a corner of a quilt, then a design like Clouds fill in another corner. That sounds like an awesome idea for a funky baby quilt!
Where do you plan to use Rise and Shine? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Let’s go quilt,
Leah Day
Have you checked out the free motion quilting design gallery lately?
I recently updated it to include all of the designs for the Free Motion Quilting Project and the walking foot designs I shared this year. I’ve also added link pages for the longarm quilting videos and quilt alongs I’ve shared as well. That’s well over 700 tutorials for you to browse through and watch any time!
