Rhonda Bracey: At Random

A quilt entirely made of scrappy strips…. And fabric scraps from many of the past five or more decades too, I think! I suspect that some of these fabrics were from the 1940s or 50s. Others were definitely from the 60s and 70s, while still others were likely from the 80s and 90s. I’m not sure there were many/any fabrics in this quilt top that were more recent than the 1990s!

As an example, the yellow, blue and pink fabric strip in this photo is likely a fabric from the 40s or 50s, and the others surrounding it are probably from the 60s or 70s, while the really bright crocodile/hippo one is likely from the 80s or 90s (click on a photo to see it larger):

And there was no order to how these strips were put together — lights were with other lights, or mediums, or darks…; colours were placed at random; and fabric styles were also random. Viewed as a whole, this quilt is actually quite nice, but up close it didn’t do much for me 😉

How to quilt it? I was tempted to take the easy way out and do any all-over design like open headbands or a large meandering stipple. But then I wondered how I’d tackle the black border. So I decided to emphasise the strips.

I started from approximately the middle and using my Line Tamer ruler I stitched out to the edge, stitching in the ditch as far as possible (some strips were wonky, so I did the best I could). When I got to the edge of the strips, I lined up the ruler with the black border’s seam to make sure I stitched out ot the edge perpendicular to the seam. I repeated this for each seam for some 10 or so strips. I then turned the quilt around and ditch stitched the other side of those stitching lines from the middle out.

Then I went back to the middle and started the strips on the other side of the centre, stitching from the middle about halfway along the length of a strip out to the edge of the border. Again, I did about 10 or so strips, then turned the quilt around and did the opposite side of those half-done stitching lines.

And kept on until I reached the top and bottom edges of the quilt.

Then I came back and started again in the middle, this time stitching a centre line between each of the stitching lines I’d already created. This resulted in a parallel stitching line about every 1/2 to 3/4 inch apart.

The effect I was looking for was a ‘modern quilt‘ look. Many ‘modern quilts’ that I’ve seen in magazines and on the internet use a lot of parallel straight stitching and very geometric squares, rectangles, etc. — I thought parallel stitching it would be an interesting effect with these old fabrics.

I was pleased with the final result. When the stitching only followed the seams, there was something missing. Adding the lines of stitching between the seams fixed that. I was pleased with how it turned out.

Threads used:

• Top: Fil-Tec Harmony variegated pastels — yellow, pink, blue, and green (40 wt cotton; colour ‘Spring’ #14062)
• Bobbin: charcoal Wonderfil Deco-Bob (80 wt; colour DB 122)