Rhonda Bracey: At Random

I started and finished this one at the Community Quilts stand at QuiltWest, so I was talking about my design choices and how I did the FMQ’ing as I was quilting it. That was an interesting experience. Even more interesting, Sandra, the lady who made the quilt top, came and watch me work on it too, then came back when it was finished to get a photo of it.

I can’t tell you what threads I used as I didn’t write them down. But as I was at the Craft Fair doing this, I was using a Bernina 750 Quilters Edition sewing machine, not my usual Sweet 16.

Because I was demonstrating, I needed to do a design that I had a lot of ‘muscle memory’ for, so I did my open headbands. That way, I didn’t need to concentrate on my quilting so much if I was talking. And because the fabrics in this quilt were so ‘busy’, I didn’t want to do a complex design to detract from the fabrics.

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Sandra and her quilted quilt!

Back:

This pretty quilt was almost perfectly square, which was some achievement considering the triangular/bias blocks in the border! How to quilt it?

I started by stitching in the ditch around every stinkin’ coloured piece of fabric… Yep. Every one.

Then I auditioned some designs by putting a plastic sheet over the top of the quilt and marking on it with a marker, erasing, marking again, etc. until I got something I thought would work. The borders were always going to be cross-hatched to match the fabric seams and the angles of the little coloured squares in them, so that was easy. And I decided not to stitch the coloured fabrics, just the white space.

For the main star blocks, I did all sorts of things — 3-petal half flowers with a curlicue in the centre of the central petals; art deco style triangular type things in the squares (some facing one, some facing out), then finally big art deco style lines in the odd shapes.

I used my Line Tamer ruler for the cross-hatching in the borders, and for the very large outlines of the odd-shaped diamonds; everything else was free motion, including the stitch in the ditch straight lines.

I quite liked the overall effect.

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Threads used:

• Top: Fil-Tec ‘Glide’ (40 wt trilobal polyester, colour ‘Cream’ #20001)
• Bottom: Fil-Tec Magna-Glide pre-wound bobbin (white)

How to quilt this large quilt? I started by stitching in the ditch around all the blocks to stabilise it. Then I tackled the sashing strips and border as the fabric design ‘told’ me to do vertical stripey things. I added a spiral at each green corner join.

For the main blocks, I did a 3-petal flower type thing in the cream triangles. And then I came to a screeching halt. What to do in the 3-strip centre blocks?

I decided to alternate the motif, doing a curvy matrix in one, then a star in the other. The star goes from mid-point to opposite corner, to opposite mid-point etc. and I think it was quite effective. I used a soft green thread for these centres.

No rulers or marking pens were harmed in quilting this quilt 😉 It was ALL free motion. Even the stitch in the ditch… I’m getting much better at almost straight lines on my Sweet Sixteen.

This was a big quilt. I think it took about 6 hours to quilt.

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The back:

Threads used:

• Top: Fil-Tec ‘Glide’ (40 wt trilobal polyester, colour ‘Cream’ #20001); Madeira Rayon (40 wt rayon, colour 1047)
• Bottom: Fil-Tec Magna-Glide pre-wound bobbin (white)