I love making bright sun design quilts. Reds, oranges, and yellows are some of my favorite colors though I must confess to loving just about any color as long as it is dynamic. This is my second blog discussing how to use some varied free motion designs in a sun quilt to create more excitement and texture today.
In this quilt I used a free motion design I like to use a lot which can
easily be used to fill columns of varied sizes or, as in the previous blog post, to create leaf-like designs. It is a continuous down and around and up then down and around and up the other side, repeated and adjusted for size depending on the space to be filled. Often you see sun quilts with rays of stitching but I wanted to try something like rays but spiked up a notch.
I stitched every other ray (some rays are actually two columns of pieced fabric) in the curved pattern off set by simply curved lines. The curved pattern you can see expands outward as the rays enlarge. The curved lines are stitched with some reaching a point part way down the ray so as not to have too dense stitching at the center. I sort of make up these designs as I go along, often trying out the ideas on scraps before launching forth on a quilt.
The stitching around the half circle sun in the middle is just three simple half circles in the shape of the fabric, curved in and out, nothing fancy but just enough to separate out the sun from the rays.
I used a medium orange thread for the entire quilt which made the thread more visible in the yellow section, blend in the middle orange sections and become more visible again in the red sections. The stitching is very important to give this quilt character and texture. It feels like the sun is singing out to you with a vibrance that straight rays might not convey on their own.