Rhonda Bracey: At Random

This was a fairly ‘busy’ scrappy quilt, with an equally ‘busy’ border fabric.

I decided to quilt it in feathers, starting from the centre and working out along the diagonals and from the centre to the mid-point of the sides, with a few extra stems added so that no feather was super large. In each feather, I also stitched a centre spine to reduce the puffiness.

I used a variegated thread in red, blue, purple, green and orange for the feathers and the same thread for the flames in the border fabric.

(Click on a photo to view it larger)

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Threads used:

• Top:  Superior Rainbows ‘Carnival’ (40 wt, trilobal polyester; colour #821)
• Bobbin: Wonderfil Deco-Bob (80wt, colour DB 414)

This was a BIG quilt — at a guess, it was about 50 x 80 inches. It took me about 6 hours to quilt.

Initially, I thought I’d outline the coloured shapes and echo that in the white, then do some other stuff with rulers. But after doing the first one of MANY coloured ‘diamonds’, I decided that would take way too long, so instead I decided to do an all-over, continuous line design in a cubed meander. It still took 6 hours; had I done what my first thought was, it would have taken well over 12 hours to quilt this quilt.

I ran out of the 1000 m spool of pale blue variegated cotton thread I was using so had to finish the edge blocks in a pale blue rayon thread. I had a hard time figuring out where one thread started and the other finished, so hopefully the recipient will never know 😉

I was pleased with my choice of all-over motif — I think it fits well with the ‘masculine’ nature of the pieced fabrics and the back. I suspect this is one of the quilts the ladies have made that will go to St Barts, a facility for the homeless.

(Click on a photo to view it larger)

Back:

Threads used:

• Top: Wonderfil Tutti variegated pale blue (cotton, 50 wt, colour TU210; Robison-Anton ‘Paris blue’ (rayon, 40 wt, colour 2283)
• Bobbin: Bobbinfil (white, 70 wt, cotton)