A Walk at Sunset - A Trip Around the World Quilt

I named this quilt for my evening walk with Tim and the dogs. It's my favourite time of day. We go after dinner, usually while the kitchen's a mess and the kids still need wrangling through tidy up and showers and bed time. We probably should go after all this is done but we've been wrangling one way or another all day, and we're ready to escape, to see the sky, to feel the cool breeze coming off the wetlands, to watch the dogs bound around, overcome with joy at being let off the leash and waiting for the ball to be thrown. We throw the ball on a big, often empty, football field near our house as the sun sets, the empty expanse letting us see all of it, until it's too dark to see the ball, and then we wander home, refreshed and ready to face the evening routine. And we ponder the fact that something so simple and repetitive and pointless can bring us so much peace and happiness.

I often feel like wrangling has become my mode of being. My home has become a list of things that need fixing. My business, a source of great joy for me, is also marked with great uncertainty. I work hard, I put things out into the world, and I have no control over the outcome, not over people's spending choices or the algorithms. The morning and afternoon and weekend routines that keep the kids clothed and fed and in school on time, with homework done, swimming costumes rinsed and dried ready for the next lesson, the never ending list of dance supplies required as my teenager takes on more ballet. It all requires so much regularity and faithfulness and self-control, it can be hard to think of it as anything other than a slog.

Then I started English paper piecing squares.

I say that as a kind of marketing joke - "I made this quilt and it changed my life!" That isn't true. My life is exactly the same as when I started this quilt. Still jammed windows and swimming costumes and algorithms. But something in me has shifted while coming up with my defence of hand-stitching squares in response to the imagined and real disdain for the idea. 

I started hand sewing squares because I really wanted to. It was ALL I wanted to do. I'd done it once before for my bed quilt, another Trip Around the World quilt I made during the pandemic, and I'd loved it. Loved the slow, steady, interesting emerging of the pattern and the colour play, loved the peaceful repetition of the added shapes, loved how completely easy it was to line up the next seams to stitch, without needing to fold papers in place to get around the corner. I was ready to make another, but I spent about a month putting it off. Making a pattern and kit from squares seemed like a ridiculous business move - who the heck was going to buy squares when you can machine sew them? - and I can't really afford a dud business move right now. 

But if there's anything in me that's louder than the gnawing stress of financial uncertainty, it's the inspiration of a quilt that needs to be made. And so I dove in.

I dove into FOUR quilts and this one, A Walk at Sunset, is one of them. Copying the format of a traditional Trip Around the World Quilt (which was made way before the days of sewing machines, and therefore hand-pieced back then too ;P), I was inspired to use the Scrappy Rainbow Fat 16th bundle from my shop. To build the bundle, I'd ordered bolts of fabric that were super useful basics - small florals and geometrics, stripes and scattered spots, perfect for the small pieces often used in English Paper Piecing. When the fabric arrived, I had a little moment of doubt about my choices. The stars were more neon than I expected, and the grey-aquas more muted. Did they really go together? Determined to try out my idea of helping people who were new to quilting build a scrap collection in small, useful pieces, I forged ahead and created the bundles. 

Even though I intended the bundles to be more like 'paints', full of useful colours for a variety of projects, rather than a kit to make a single quilt, I've wanted to make a quilt from the collection ever since. And, as mentioned earlier, I just couldn't get squares out of my head. 

Because my fat 16ths are metric (that is, they're a 16th of a metre instead of a yard), they measured 10" x 11" instead of 9" x 11". That made them super simple to cut into 2 1/2" squares with minimal waste. I chose 1 3/4" square paper pieces to fit this size fabric (and to make it easy to use any pre-cuts). I cut all of my prints in the bundle from the outset, getting 16 squares per piece, and then laid it out on my design wall, starting at the centre and working my way out to the corners. I was inspired by my sunset walks to embrace the neon and the greys together, to not worry about the various rounds sticking strictly to a single colour, to have moments of super high contrast between rows, and moments where the rows almost blended into the next, and to allow for some clash, and some muddy portions that allow all the focus to be on the bright and beautiful parts. 

Once I'd mostly settled on the layout, I started pulling down shapes, round by round, basting them to the paper templates and hand stitching them together. It's the most fun I've had making a quilt in a long time. Spurred on by watching it grow, but also completely rested in the fact that I knew what was coming next, I sewed for almost 3 weeks straight. I loved watching the pattern emerge, seeing the gentle shift in colours as I followed the rounds, loved being completely engaged in a quilt that had all the decisions already made. Not once did it feel like wrangling. And you what? I think if I'd machine sewn it, it would have. All that making sure the rows stay in the right order, and needing to unpick them if they didn't, all that getting up and down to the iron, and feeding the growing quilt top through my machine carefully so that my points line up. I prefer this. This sitting on the couch with my piles of basted squares beside me, the growing weight of the quilt on my lap, adding to it from the centre out rather than the top down. This suited me perfectly. 

Once I got to this stage below, I decided to change tack and work on each corner individually. I was left with a limited choice of colours, some with only a few squares left, and I figured it would be better for each corner to work on it's own, in relation to the centre of the quilt, rather than be matching each other. I had a bunch of oranges and maroons I could have used too, but I decided to stick with the blacks and blues and greens and keep the edges of my sunset low contrast and dark. It reminds me of the line of pine trees bordering our football field, how they become murky and dark in contrast to the last light above the horizon. 

I've been thinking a lot about my evening walk while I stitch this quilt. It's got me wondering if I've let life's wrangle enter every corner of my life unnecessarily, if I've gotten stuck on productivity and the striving for financial security, thinking that if I just work hard enough, long enough, that everything will settle for good, when I have a lovely, slow, wrangle-free, settled moments waiting for me right here. Right here in evening walks and hand-sewn squares. And so, to folks who ask why I'd hand sew this quilt when machine sewing is faster, I ask, why would you want it to be faster? Why rush through something so lovely and deliberate when life is already so full of rush?

I think you would love English Paper Pieced squares too! Buy the fabric and EPP kit below to make your own little slice of peace.