I Love This Quilt Update! Baja Sunrise

Did you get a chance to check out the McCall’s Quilting March/April + May/June 2024 double issue yet? It’s so beautiful and enticing if I do say so myself! It’s chock-full of cool, unique, and creative quilt patterns inspired by the Art Deco movement that emerged approximately 100 years ago and is still inspiring designers today. The aesthetic lends itself so well to quilty interpretations, with long straight lines and bold geometric motifs. You will definitely want to look through a digital or print copy if you love to see and/or make amazing quilts.

The Quilt

One of our regular features in McCall’s Quilting is I Love This Quilt, where a staff member selects a pattern from our archives (one that they personally love) and remakes it in their own way, and we share the pattern in the magazine with both versions. It’s so fun. For this issue, I chose Baja Sunset by Bea Lee.

It’s such a striking design! The colors positively glow; but with a gradient of 12 different colors, small blocks sewn with bias edges, and lots of those blocks with different color combinations, it’s a significant undertaking. I decided to remake it using the Moonchild collection by Fran Gulick for Riley Blake Designs, a pretty group of prints in corals, creams, purples, and blues. Since I knew I probably couldn’t finish the entire top before the deadline, I started in the center and worked my way out.

My Quilt

I was able to complete the nine center blocks before everything was due, which is what I shared in the magazine. It’s a nice start! But I definitely didn’t want to put those nine blocks aside with the rest of the fabric and never finish the top. I have too many of those projects. So, I kept going, working outward.

The trickiest part of remaking this pattern was ensuring that all my fabric substitutions were correct as I made the blocks. I picked very different fabrics from the original quilt and had to keep a reference key close at hand as I sewed each round of blocks. I laid out the patches of each block and cross-referenced the pattern multiple times before sewing them together. Some of the prints blend into one another due to their similar background colors, but I like the complex, unexpected look that my fabric combination created; so different from the bold brightness of Bea’s quilt.

And I’ve made a lot of progress! I got all the blocks done and joined, plus the first border! I was faithful to Bea’s color placement throughout, though I may change the remaining two borders to feature the prints and colors I like best (though of course, fabric quantity will play an important role, too).

This is what I’m leaning towards for the last two borders. What do you think? What colors, prints, or fabric collection would you use to remake Baja Sunset? Do you love this quilt as much as I do?

Happy quilting!