Rhonda Bracey: At Random

This was a difficult quilt to quilt. I think there was a heap of high-loft polyester batting behind the main top, even though the borders only had standard low-loft batting — the main top was very puffy, usually an indication of fluffy polyester batting. Then there were the buttons in the centre of all the flowers, plus the applique, plus seams that hadn’t been pressed one way. All of these add to the difficulty in quilting a quilt.

To stabilise it as much as possible, I first stitched in the ditch around all the main elements, including around all the fused applique pieces, and the borders. Then to reduce the puffiness, I did a meandering medium-sized stippled in the white space around each teapot and mug. I was going to do spaghetti lines, but the stripes in the white tone-on-tone background fabric went in different directions, so that wasn’t going to work.

I left the green and gold  border unstitched, and stitched different length ‘u’ shapes in the yellow border.

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Threads used:

• Top: Fil-Tec Glide ‘White’ (40 wt, trilobal polyester, colour 10000); Fil-Tec Glide ‘Marigold’ (40 wt, trilobal polyester, colour 80130)
• Bottom: Fil-Tec Magna Glide Classic pre-wound bobbin (white, light tan)