Rhonda Bracey: At Random

How to quilt this very geometric blue and red quilt? Circles! Well, spirals/swirls a la Angela Walters, as seen on her Craftsy class on machine quilting negative space.

I used a red, blue, purple, and cream variegated thread for all the top stitching. When I checked online for the name of the thread colour in the Superior Rainbows collection, I found that #814 (the label on this thread and another spool of it I had) didn’t match the colour of the thread I used, so I suspect that I was using old stock with a number that’s now used for a different colour.

I really liked how the circular elements juxtaposed the rectangles and squares used in the quilt.

In the border, I stitched some ‘sort of’ flames (or petals), with an inner flame/petal and an outer one, and then echoed all round. I used the same thread in the border as I used for the main part of the quilt.

And yes, in case you were wondering, I stitched all those swirls ‘freehand’ — no rulers, no marking.

(Click on a photo to view it larger.)

This is the thread I used — it was labelled #814 and is from the Superior Rainbows range:

This is what the current catalog has as #814 in Superior Rainbows thread — they are QUITE different colours:

Threads used:

• Top: Superior Rainbows (40 wt, trilobal polyester, colour #814 — NOTE: this is NOT the same thread in the current Rainbows catalog under that number. The closest I could find was #823, though that’s still not the same colour as the thread I used that was labelled #814)
• Bottom: Bobbinfil (white)