Rhonda Bracey: At Random

This was a very detailed applique quilt — someone had spent many hours making it. And I spent many hours quilting it! (I suspect about 10 hours in total).

I started with the centerpiece by echo quilting the words, then I used tight McTavishing to fill in the rest of the background of this centre, thus ‘popping’ the appliqued flowers (click on a photo to view it larger)

I stippled the background of the remainder of the applique sections, with a tight small stippling stitch, again to ‘pop’ the appliqued elements.

For the star blocks, I used a few different elements. I wanted to try out the spiral design from the November Free Motion Quilting Challenge, so there are quite a few spirals in these star blocks 😉

I stitched all the cream areas with Superior Threads’ King Tut “Papyrus” (colour 972), and used the same bobbin throughout (Deco Bob DB 115).

I decided not to quilt the sashing as there was already a lot of quilting on this quilt. However, the borders needed to be stablised, so I quilted a continuous run of spirals in them using Isacord thread (colour 4133). However, I didn’t take a photo as these spirals were almost impossible to see against the teal floral fabric.

The finished quilt: