Rhonda Bracey: At Random

This one was awkward. The quilt top was in colours that didn’t ‘speak’ to me, and in fabrics that I would never choose. In addition, all the setting triangles and possibly the main ‘diamonds’ were cut on the bias, so this quilt top was very wonky and wouldn’t sit flat, no matter what I did. There was a lot of puckering overall, and within the individual diamonds (had they been cut on the square and with the grain, then stitched, I might have had a fighting chance…).

As a result, my main objective in quilting this quilt was to ‘beat it into submission’ and get rid of all the wonky bits by quilting it fairly heavily. Even so, there were a couple of places where I still ended up with some puckers, and one place where I had to tuck an excess piece of fabric under at the seam to avoid a pleat.

All these bias issues meant that this was not a quilt that was going to lend itself to feature quilting in each square. An all over design was needed! As the fabrics were nearly all small florals I went with a 5-petal flower and small leaf motif.

With such a tight motif, I needed to use a thread that blended with the fabric and didn’t show easily. I chose a Superior Thread ‘Rainbows’ variegated thread in pink, tan, olive, and cream (40 wt, colour #806), and for the bobbin I used a Superior Threads King Tut cream thread (40 wt, ‘Papyrus’ — colour #972).

I ended up doing 170,000 quilting stitches, taking between 6 and 8 hours (I didn’t measure my time, but it was over two days).

Click on a photo to see it larger.

Back: