Rhonda Bracey: At Random

A is for apple, B is for bee, and D is for dolphin! And all come together in this wall hanging.

Last year, one of the fabric painting techniques Velda Newman showed us to do was how easy it was to paint an apple. My apples had just been lurking in the sewing room, and I wondered if I’d ever use them in a quilt. Then I was hunting through some fabric and found my green jelly roll strip quilt top, and for some reason put them close together on the design wall, and Voila! a new quilt top emerged. This one can be for a nursery or an early childhood classroom. With the painting on the apples, I wouldn’t recommend it as a baby quilt/play rug. Although the artist acrylic paints are unlikely to be a problem, it’s not something I’d want to risk.

Anyhow, here’s how this wall hanging came together — I fused the apples to the quilt top, then stitched around them with blanket stitch on my domestic sewing machine, added the batting and backing, stitched in the ditch along all the seams, then stitched the lower case letter ‘a’ (for apple) in all the spaces between the lines. Then I surface stitched the apples in four different colours of thread — red, orange-red, yellow, and pink. I added a border that contains bees (‘b’ is for bee), and then noticed that a couple of the batik fabrics near the bottom of the quilt contained dolphins (‘d’ is for dolphin). Thus ‘A is for apple’ is born!

This art quilt is now available for sale from my Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/au/listing/618937617/a-is-for-apple-wall-hanging-art-quilt

The back:

Not me! My first pair of Machingers quilting gloves! I’m retiring this pair after faithful service for 3 years, 150+ quilts, and some 13.5 million stitches on my Sweet Sixteen. I have two other pairs, so it’s time for this first pair to be retired.

Yes, they look grubby, and yes, I’ve washed them, and yes, they still work, but the rubberised finger tips are almost worn through, and the elastic wrist bands are floppy and won’t stay on my wrists anymore.

I wear them for every quilt, and find I have to grab the quilt much more if I don’t put them on.

So it’s the bin for these faithful servants… The new pair is already out of the packet and ready to go to work.