Beachy – 1999

Beachy is one of my favorite quilts.  I loved the pattern as soon as I saw it.  The pattern is “Just Beachy” by Karen Stone.  I spent a lot of time

gathering just the right “bright” fabrics to make the quilt.  I decided to make it a little bigger than the pattern called for, which was a large wall hanging or throw size, so it could be used as a twin quilt.  (I continue to try to make my quilts fit beds.)  The pattern utilizes mirror images of the designs.  For instance, the sun image is traced onto fusible web and cut out carefully to save both the sun image and the background.  A sun piece is fused to a background square.  The background piece is then fused to same size background square of a contrasting color to create a reverse image.

You can see this in the sun images above.  A yellow sun is fused onto a dark turquoise square and then the piece it was cut from is fused to a red background which shows through as red sun.  The sashing pieces are worked in the same way so that no fabric or fusible web is wasted in making the quilt.  The sashing is joined at the corners by four patches.

So it didn’t become boring with similar size blocks, there are three giant sun blocks thrown in.  All the raw edges are satin stitched.  I used rayon thread throughout the quilt for the satin stitching and for the machine quilting.  I think I bought as many colors of thread as I did fabric.

The outside borders are done by cutting a piece of fabric twice the intended width of the border, then cutting that in half in a random, gently curving line.  The straight edges are sewn to the quilt and the curved edges become the outside edges.

To me, this is a wonderful quilt design by Karen Stone.  I thoroughly enjoyed making it.  It took about three months to make and it is one of the few quilts that I didn’t get bored with and start another project somewhere along the way.

I free-motion machine quilted this quilt using only a meandering design and quilting in the non-fused sections so where I quilted was entirely random depending on placement of the design pieces.  I quilted a wave design in the outside border similar to the wave in the sashing.

This quilt won a Blue Ribbon and Best of Show in the 2000 Mooresville Centerpiece Quilt Guild Show.  Here I am with Beachy at the show.