Rhonda Bracey: At Random

I had high hopes for this quilt. It was big and it had a rich backing fabric that led me to believe that the top would be as exotic. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as exotic as I’d hoped for. And the batting was a high-loft polyester wadding, which meant that this quilt was hard to handle as it kept wanting to ‘run away’ from me.

As a consequence of its sheer size and the thick polyester wadding, my first job was to stitch it down. Normally, basting pins are sufficient, but this one needed the ‘ESS’ touch (‘[stitch] Every Stinking Seam’ — attributable to Cindy Needham), so I stitched in the ditch around every block, and then within the blocks using a very lightweight (100 wt) thread in a matching beige. While I didn’t quite achieve ESS, I came close. I started using my Line Tamer ruler for the stitch in the ditch, but as some of the blocks only had short straight lengths, I discarded it and went for ‘eyeballing’ the straight lines.

Although I was tempted to do some quite detailed quilting in each block, time was against me (and I really didn’t like the ‘hand’ of the quilt with all that polyester wadding), so instead I decided to just quilt the sashing borders with a decorative orange thread, spiralling in the keystone blocks, and doing vertical and horizontal wavy lines between the spiral blocks.

I had to take the photos of this quilt inside as it was bucketing with rain outside and I was in a hurry to get this one packaged up and taken with me to Perth to be dropped at the Community Quilts coordinator’s house. So the photos are a little blurry.

(Click on a photo to view it larger)

Threads used:

• Top: Robison-Anton (40 wt, rayon, colour Dk Tex Oran #2469); Invisifil (100 wt, light tan/beige)
• Bobbin: Invisifil (100 wt, navy)