Flight at Sunrise

"Flight at Sunrise" is the 4th UFO Challenge quilt I have completed this year for Missouri River Quilt Guild's challenge. We pre-select 6 UFO quilt projects we want to complete in 2014 and have 2 months to complete the quilt that is drawn for that time period.

I pieced "Flight at Sunrise" in 2008 and put it away to quilt at a later date. As with many quilters, life gets in the way and projects don't get completed. This UFO challenge has been good for me, making me dig into my stack of UFO's and get some of them completed.


I quilted the "birds" first then the background. This is the first time I started at the bottom of the quilt and worked my way up when quilting the background. I usually roll the quilt back to the top and work my way down. This time, I quilted it from the bottom to the top so that I could see where the colors were changing in the background fabric and be prepared to change thread - and hopefully not quilt the wrong colored thread in the wrong place. It worked out pretty well.



I used 4 different quilting patterns in the birds. Above are photos of 2 of the patterns. The background is a swirl with lots of echoing. The batting is Pellon 80/20, the thread is YLI Longarm Quilter's thread and Signature 100% cotton. I used whatever thread matched the fabric. All the background fabrics are hand-dyed - some with Rit Dye heat set in the microwave (the dark blue and purplish red fabrics), but most were dyed with Procion MX Fiber Reactive dyes such as the light blue fabric below and the orange fabrics above. The birds are pieced with commercial fabric.




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