Yacht Rock Digital Quilting Design

I have to be honest and say I wasn't very excited about this design until I stitched it out. The moment I did, I was smitten by the texture! In fact, this sample has remained "staged" around my home well after the pictures were taken and it continually catches my eye! 

When I was designing it, I had a draft of the shape saved as Keyed in the computer... because the one repeat looked like a type of a key? I'm never sure how these things take hold, I just knew it needed a new name. Naming is hard! I want a name that is unique so that it won't be confused with other pantographs on the market and it's always nice if there's an element of the design that ties to the name in some kind of way.

I asked Josh for naming suggestions and he thought that the design looked like a little sailboat which made him say "Yacht Rock". And obviously, that had my interest right away.

Yacht Rock is a hard-to-define genre of music, although the Wikipedia entry here will help paint a picture.

The look shown here in the sample is accomplished by offsetting every other row at 50% and closing the gap between rows so that it meets up with the prior row. For inexperienced quilters, maintaining straight alignment throughout an entire quilt can be tricky. Our blog post on precise alignment might help if you're needing some guidance.

This sample quilt size is approximately 45" x 50". For reference in scaling this design, the pictures here show the default row height of 2". If you include the gaps between the rows, the total pattern height would be 2.67". That would mean that the gap amount is -0.67".  I use an Intelliquilter to stitch out my designs, so your terms might be a bit different. 

You may choose to increase the scale of the design if you're quilting a large quilt. I really love small repeats that make the texture look irresistibly touch-worthy, but I also understand that you might not want to be at your machine supervising it all day. Life is all about balance.

This design has a very straightforward stitch path. You can watch the video at the top of this post to watch how it stitches out. The clip of music playing in the background is Hey Nineteen by Steely Dan. ;)

Let's see, when would you want to use this design for a quilt top? Well, for sure if you have any Steely Dan quilt tops, obviously. 

But really, this design has such a fun texture that it could be used successfully on a variety of modern tops. If you think a top could handle some complexity because of solid fabrics and/or negative space—this would be a fun one to use.

This E2E design would work well for nautical themes, as well. I think that the hint of the letter A or V (if inverted) could also be significant as with a child's name.

If you use this design, we'd love for you to use the hashtag #yachtrockpanto and tag @longarmleague so we can see what you're up to!   

For a different look altogether, see the alternate version below. This is what the design would look like without any offsetting.