I loved this quilt! If you’d told me about a quilt in aqua/teal blue and tans, I’d have said ‘Yuck!’, but I just loved how these colours played so well together.
It was a big quilt, with lots of rectangles of various sizes, and multiple coordinating fabrics, some of which were curvy lines with dots/circles in them. That became my overall theme for quilting this quilt.
Because the edges were all so straight, I decided NOT to use any rulers for any of the quilting. Even the so-called ‘straight’ lines in the sashing strips are wonky free motion lines. That was a deliberate choice. I wanted the quilting on this quilt to be organic and not to rigidly follow the straight lines of the blocks. I quilted a different motif in each block — some with wonky lines, some with circles, some curvy lines, some with a combination… I repeated some motifs (e.g. the rectangular spiral), but avoided two motifs the same in any one block or two the same next to each other. I used the same soft blue thread throughout.
For the border, I did big loopy things, sort of like figures of eight/infinity symbols, but without any crossing lines.
It took me about 10 hours to quilt this quilt, running at 50% speed on my Sweet Sixteen for all the stitching (and with very few thread breakages – that might be because I used a new size 18 needle). Had I been using rulers, it would’ve taken much longer.
(Click on a photo to view it larger)
Threads used:
- Top: Robison-Anton (40 wt, rayon, colour: ‘Sprite’)
- Bottom: Fil-Tec Glide pre-wound in white
Rhonda Bracey: At Random 