New Design: Break of Dawn
My latest design is in the August issue of American Patchwork & Quilting. It’s called Break of Dawn.
I’ve been playing with rectangles I call “bricks” for a few years now, and this design began when I experimented with a light-to-dark progression of bricks across the quilt.
I still love this original idea and will likely create a quilt from it. One of the best things about bricks is that once you have an idea, it can be made with any size of brick that you like. I think this would be lovely in bricks cut 2″ x 3.5″. (A brick in my world always finishes twice as long as wide.) They’d finish 1.5″ x 3″.
In an effort to jazz it up, I added a few Flying Geese. (Super easy to do in EQ8 software!)
That’s when I saw rooftops! If I rotated them, I could create a neighborhood made from Flying Geese and bricks. And if I maintained the colorwash, it could suggest a sunrise.
Here’s one of my Electric Quilt drawings:
And here is a flat shot of the actual quilt:
Used with permission from American Patchwork & Quilting® magazine. ©2025 Meredith Operations Corporation. All rights reserved.
Some of the names I used during the quilt’s evolution made me laugh.
There was Suburb Sunrise. And Sunrise Over Sterling. Which morphed to Sunrise Over Salem. And then the fine folks at American Patchwork & Quilting came up with Break of Dawn, which I like much better. Read more about the issue at that link—there is a lot of good stuff!
You’ll find the issue on newsstands through August 20 or you can buy it online here. I’m taking the quilt with me to Maine this week for Maine Quilts, where I’m sharing my trunk show called Make Extraordinary Scrap Quilts.
I’m also teaching some workshops:
Strange Bedfellows: Fabric Savvy Playshop has all my best tips and tricks for using fabric effectively.
Bound for Glory: Make the edges of your quilt fabulous!
StarQuar Scrap Quilts: The simplest technique ever results in unlimited quilt designs from scraps.
Tango: Fun, fast, easy—all the way to a dynamite finish!
