How to quilt this quilt? As usual, I started by stitching the ditch around all the main blocks and elements. For the border, I did a large meandering stipple, with stars in the corner squares. In the main top, the busy fabrics leant themselves to a simple motif — I chose my ‘go to’ open headband motif, using red thread.
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This small, bright scrappy quilt should cheer up a child in hospital. It had a soft flannel backing too, so will be nice and cuddly. I kept the quilting simple, but reasonably dense because the variety of fabrics used resulted in quite a few wonky seams and puckers.
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I liked this quilt, though it was a bit of a challenge to quilt because it was quite wonky. The reason this quilt top was so wonky was because the maker had used all sorts of plaid shirting fabrics + denim to make it — those different fabrics had different thicknesses and ‘hand’, resulting in the fabric reacting in different ways to being sewn. This was not the maker’s fault – it’s just a consequence of using widely varying fabrics.
But those wonky seams and the puckering in this quilt top needed to be tamed — either by ironing them out or stitching them out. I chose the ‘stitch it out’ method because I didn’t think ironing would’ve worked in the long term. This meant I needed to use fairly dense stitching to beat those puckers into submission 🙂 To achieve this end, I decided to quilt it using a ‘square meander’, crossing lines to form sort of rectangular shapes. And yes, I tamed it!
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This was a pretty pink and green quilt. I started by stitching in the ditch around the main blocks and borders, then did straight lines in the border, following (approximately) the lines formed by the squares in the fabric’s pattern. I quilted the main part of the quilt top with a flower variation on the open headband motif — instead of an arc for the final layer, I stitched half shells, emulating flower petals.
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Threads used:
Rhonda Bracey: At Random 