What a bright, vibrant kaleidoscope/stack-and-whack quilt! (and the back is even brighter!) But how to quilt it? All those colours, those designs in the fabrics, those triangular shapes…
First, I stitched in the ditch around the central black banner and all the borders. Then I laid some clear plastic over one of the motifs in the banner and drew a couple of ideas before committing to stitching them. My initial thought was to do a stylised flower pattern with squared off petals, echoing the stitching lines and the overall shape of each hexagon, but then I moved the plastic a tad and saw that I could do the same but off-centre, thus ‘cutting’ the seam lines with the straight top of each petal (see the second photo for what I mean — it shows it better than I can describe it). As each centre was full of seams, I wanted to avoid stitching there (I’ve had a needle break doing that and it wasn’t pretty… or cheap to fix!), so instead of stitching in to the centre of each ‘flower’ I left a gap to give the illusion of a centre.
I stitched the ‘flowers’ in the central banner first, in black, but I was having trouble with that thread breaking all the time, so I switched to one of the other threads I’d chosen — a deep pink/cerise Isacord thread, which gave me NO trouble at all for the rest of the quilt. I stitched all the flowers in the main quilt top and the black areas and the border with this thread and it went through my machine like a hot knife through butter. Where possible I also stitched in the ditch with this pink thread in the main areas to get from one hexagon to the next without stopping.
All stitching was free motion (except for the straight stitch-in-the-ditch lines when I used my Line Tamer ruler), so some of the flowers in the black areas and the borders have 5 petals, some have 6, others 7 or 8.
For the border, I stitched a half flower of the motif I used in the main quilt, again using free motion (no rulers or markings).
(Click on a photo to view it larger)
Back:
Threads used:
- Top: Isacord (40 wt trilobal polyester, colour 2508); and Robison-Anton (40 wt rayon, colour 2632 ‘Jet Black’)
- Bottom: Bobbinfil (70 wt cotton, black)
Rhonda Bracey: At Random 
Fun quilting! You are turning out quilts at an amazing rate.
Just to be clear — I don’t make the quilts, and often I don’t even baste them. They come to me already made and often basted. My job is just to do the quilting and the final trimming. Then they go back to the Community Quilts coordinator and she passes them on to the person who adds the binding and the label before they go back to her for distribution to one of the charities the program supports. Details here: http://waquilters.com/activities/community-quilts/
–Rhonda
Ty for your posts, Rhonda – I learn so much 🙂
Love the stylized flower idea and I’m with you on not stitching those centers. I experienced a needle break (although no machine damage!) that was startling and vowed that I wouldn’t stitch such points/areas again!
Very pretty quilt with such vibrant colors. You did a great job as always.