Rhonda Bracey: At Random

This was a HUGE scrappy quit, done in a fairly traditional style. In fact, I think a lot of the top was hand stitched. What an effort!

How to quilt it? Well, the obvious first step was to stitch in the ditch around ALL the blocks and borders, and the coloured fabrics in those blocks. This took a few hours, even with my favourite Line Tamer ruler.

I decided to leave the coloured blocks unstitched, except for the ditch stitching, so they’d ‘pop’. In the white space, I echo quilted about a half inch from the seams, then free-motion stitched large ribbon candy in the remaining spaces.

I did a similar treatment in the final white borders, leaving the inner white border and the coloured border unstitched (except for stitch in the ditch).

In total, this quilt took about 6 hours to quilt on my Handi Quilter Sweet Sixteen. It was big!

One of the photos below shows the quilting in progress — the area on the left is fully quilted; the area on the right is just pinned ready for stitching. You can see what a difference quilting makes.

(Click on a photo to view it larger)

Threads used:

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