Rhonda Bracey: At Random

This big quilt offered its share of challenges. It was nice and square, which was great. But the cream fabric used for the sashings and border was very hard, thick, and stiff as it was impregnated with gold flecks — I suspect it wasn’t a ‘quilting cotton’. As a result, all the needle punches through the three layers created fairly large holes, which I hope will close up and ‘self heal’ over time.

How to quilt it? Well, the rich colours of the fabrics in the blocks and the gold flecks in the cream fabric lent itself to gold metallic thread, but I ended up only using that for the outer straight lines around each block as I had trouble with the metallic thread. So I used an ‘old gold’ rayon thread for the in-the-ditch stitching, the inner straight echo lines for each block, and for the cross-hatching inside the centre of each block, which followed the cross-hatching in the pattern of this centre fabric.

I decided to leave the rich paisley fabrics unquilted, instead stitching the sashings and borders in a fairly dense spiral motif, in a matching cream thread (though it’s called ‘Khaki’ on the thread cone!).  That way the blocks ‘pop’ and add a little puffiness to the quilt.

While I was quilting this quilt, I set up my suspension system and it worked a treat in reducing drag.

(Click on a photo to view it larger)

Threads used:

• Top: Robison-Anton (40 wt, rayon, ‘Old Gold’ colour 2201; used inside the blocks including the cross hatching in the centres of each block); Fil-tec Glisten (metallic, ‘Gold’ colour 60088; only used for the outer straight lines around the large blocks) ; Fil-tec Glide (40 wt, trilobal polyester, ‘Khaki’ colour 24525; used in the sashings and borders)
• Bottom: Fil-tec Magna Glide pre-wound bobbin (white)