Rhonda Bracey: At Random

This was another busy quilt, with a lot going on in the blocks (stars and large appliqued hearts) and in the border fabric. I decided to only quilt the ‘white space’ and leave the star points, the hearts, and the first border unquilted.

I started with the diamond shapes between the big stars, quilting a free motion heart (with curlicues) in each and finishing the hearts off with free motioned feathers. I did something similar in the large cream squares.

Next, I did the cream triangles along the blue border — also doing another featherlike motif. More feathers for the rectangular shapes along the blue border — I got the idea for how to quilt this odd shape from the ‘Create Your Own Dream Feathers’ book by Peggy Holt (thanks for this book, Glenys!).

I then stitched feathers around each appliqued heart. And stitched some plainish hearts in the very centre and the corner squares. Then the main part of the top was finished.

For the border, I decided to just follow (in general terms!) the design motif of the fabric using a similar coloured thread. This fabric was already very busy and I thought that doing something equally as busy but using another different quilting motif was going to be overload in this area. I’m glad I stuck to my original decision, even though it took much longer to quilt than I expected — there must have been thousands of curlicues in that pattern!

As an aside, I must be getting more confident in my quilting as I did all the quilting at 60-70% speed on my Handi Quilt Sweet Sixteen! That’s pretty fast!

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Threads used:

• Top: Robison-Anton ‘Maize’ for the main quilt top (rayon, 40 wt, colour #2264); Robison-Anton ‘Old Gold’ for the border (rayon, 40 wt, colour #2201)
• Bobbin: Wonderfil Deco-Bob (80 wt, colour DB 115)

I kept this one a while before deciding how to quilt it. The blue pinwheels were quite small and dense and then there was that great expanse of white space to deal with. How to quilt it???

I started with the central pinwheel area first. I thought about ‘stitch in the ditch’, but then decided to do hopping arcs, thus creating the illusion of flowers or ‘cathedral windows’. I just did these free hand — no marking of any sort — so they are a bit wonky, but as this quilt isn’t going to be in a show, I wasn’t too fussed by a little wonkiness 😉 I did these in the blue areas (with a blue variegated thread) and in the cream areas too (with a matching thread).

The next decision was how to quilt all that white space. I thought of doing Zentangle-style doodling, but it was a hot day and I really didn’t want to spend another eight hours on this quilt, even in the air conditioning. Also, the pinwheels were the focus, not the white space. So I did another variation on the open headband motif — instead of doing a second and third arc back over the first, I made a few spiky star points, then arced back and started the next one. I made these quite big, which meant they were quick to stitch. The reason I chose the spiky start points was to reflect the points of the pinwheels.

Click on a photo to view it larger.

Threads used:

• Top: Superior Rainbows variegated blue (trilobal polyester, 40 wt, colour #817), and Fil-Tec Glide for the cream (trilobal polyester, 40 wt, colour #20001)
• Bobbin: Bobbinfil (white, 70 wt)