Rhonda Bracey: At Random

There was SO much white space in this large quilt that it was almost a wholecloth quilt. The fabrics and colours in the borders sort of indicated that the eventual home for this quilt might be a men’s homeless shelter that the Community Quilts program donates quilts to, but then there was that very strange bald woman in a pinafore holding a teddy bear in the middle! What was up with that? And then there were those strange scrappy log cabin blocks in the corners, which seemed out of place with the rest of the fabrics and design.

Anyhow… how to quilt it?

Stitching in the ditch was a given around the centre block, the appliqued woman, and the border. But what to do with that enormous amount of white space? I thought of rounded shapes like feathers and headband variations, but that didn’t fit with the geometric nature of the borders. My next thought was a squared meandering stipple, but that didn’t seem right either. Then I thought about bricks. So I measured and marked lines and points for layers of bricks and mortar. But still the empty areas were quite puffy, so I needed some sort of pattern inside the bricks to tame the puffiness.

I decided to do fairly close straight lines in the bricks closest to the ‘window’ in the middle, thus creating the illusion of an old-style brick building with different bricks or stones for the window surround. But I knew that continuing that through all the bricks would not only take a lot of time, but would also tighten the quilt up too much with the quilting. So for the remaining bricks I stitched free-form shapes, emulating stones (I hope!).

For the borders, I just stitched straight lines about an inch or so apart. I didn’t use any rulers or markings for these straight lines or the ones inside the bricks near the ‘window’. I echo quilted the appliqued woman and teddy bear and then stippled around her, adding straight lines (in a variegated red) to the red frame around this block.

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Threads used:

• Top: Fil-Tec Glide ‘Cream’ (40 wt, trilobal polyester, colour 20001) — used for most of this quilt; Robison -Anton ‘Platinum’ (40 wt, rayon, colour 2571) — used for the stipplling in the centre block and the borders; Mettler Poly Sheen Multi (40 wt, polyester, colour 9924 [variegated reds]) — used for the red frame
• Bottom: Fil-Tec Magna Glide Classic pre-wound bobbin (white)