Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Every appliqued centre of this quilt was a ‘B’ word. My favourite was the banksia; I wasn’t quite sure about the very hairy baby in the bathtub!

How to quilt it? I started by stitching in the ditch around all the blocks, then around the appliqued pieces, then echo stitched about a quarter inch around each appliqued object/set.

I decided to do largish motifs in each block — I still wanted this quilt to have some puffiness. Finally, I switched to a blue thread and stitched deliberately wobbly lines along the sashing, with spirals in the corners and joins.

For this one I used quite fine thread — an 80 wt and a 100 wt in the top (with a 70 needle), and a 60 wt in the bobbin.

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Back:

Threads used:

• Top: Wonderfil Deco Bob (80 wt, colour DB112); Wonderfil Invisifil (100 wt, colour IF311)
• Bottom: Fil-Tec Magna Glide pre-wound bobbin (white)

I thought Quilt #146 was my challenge quilt in the latest bunch. Not so. It was this one!!

Why was it such a challenge? Well, it was FULL of bias edges, very thick seam joins, and lots of puffiness as a result of those bias edges. I had to do a LOT of quilting on it to try to flatten it, and I think I succeeded, for the most part. However, there are still parts of this quilt that have pleats and folds that I just couldn’t get out. And where the big circular blocks join, there are masses of seams that come together to form a big lump — having already snapped a needle off in the bobbin case before (which cost me $$ to have fixed as well as a trip to the city), I wasn’t going to attempt to sew through those. Someone has carefully appliqued on little circular disks into the centres of the other seam joins, and I’ll be suggesting that they add more where those horrible lumpy seam joins are.

I started by stitching in the ditch are all the circles and the borders to stabilise the quilt as far as possible. Then I tackled the centres of each circle inside a larger circle by curving out to a point and back in, making flower petals. For the larger circles, I did the same, dividing (with my eye) each inner area into thirds, stitching up to an outer point then back down then up to the centre point of the curve, then down and back up to a seam point.

After stitching the big flower petals like this, they were still too puffy, so I stitched some inner ‘flame’ sort of thing inside each one, then did some echo stitching around the big petals. That squashed them for the most part.

For the areas outside the circles, I just did some echo stitching in a continuous-line spiral. I left the pink borders unstitched. For the main white border, I continued the theme of the curved petals (no markings or rulers — just eyeballed them) then echo stitched around each one.

The first set of pictures below show the finished quilt, followed by pictures showing the puffiness I had to deal with in this quilt. Yes, it WAS a challenge and half!

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Puffiness:

Puffy, puffy, puffy…

Seam join with about 8 seams coming together. Very lumpy.

Stitching some puffiness into submission, but some of these folds were just unavoidable

Threads used:

• Top: Fil-Tec Magna Glide pre-wound bobbin (white)
• Bottom: Fil-Tec Magna Glide pre-wound bobbin (white)

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).

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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)

I was told when I picked up these Community Quilts for quilting that there was a ‘challenge’ quilt amongst them. I have a feeling this might have been it. Why? because someone had started quilting it (the long straight lines extending from the blocks into the borders) and had marked big circles randomly across the quilt, ready for quilting.

On pulling this one out of the bag, my first thought was to quilt it in yellow to set off the grey in the uneven width borders and to echo the yellow in the sashing strips (only on 3 sides). My second thought was to quilt the ‘white space’ in the borders with more circles (or pebbles or bubbles, or whatever you want to call them). I wasn’t quite sure what to do in the main top where the busy fabrics were.

I started by stitching around each of the circles, then free motion stitching an echo circle about one quarter inch in from the marked circle I’d just stitched. Then I continued stitching a wavy matrix inside each circle, leaving the gap between the two lines of circle stitching to act as a slightly puffy border. Even though my inner circle line wasn’t always exact (i didn’t mark it or use a ruler), with the extra stitching I don’t think it matters too much.

After I finished stitching all the circles and their centres, I had decided to do a simple all-over motif for the gaps between the circles in the very busy fabric of the main part of the quilt top. To echo the circular motif, I stitched a squared-off-end version of my ‘open headband‘ motif across all the open areas. And then I stitched circles/bubbles/pebbles in the open areas of the grey borders.

I liked the overall effect, especially the yellow thread against the grey fabric.

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Back:

Threads used:

• Top: Mettler Poly Sheen (40 wt polyester, color 0706 [bright yellow]) and when that ran out, Fil-Tec ‘Glide’ (40 wt trilobal polyester, colour 80116 ‘Mango’)
• Bottom: Can’t remember, but likely a Wonderfil Invisifil (100 wt) in a dark brown thread.

This was a little quilt, with no batting. Instead, it had a bright red polar fleece for the backing, which served as batting as well. I took a photo of the back, but reds and my phone camera just don’t play nicely together, so I haven’t added it below.

How to quilt it? I started by stitching in the ditch around all the blocks and the border as my previous experience with polar fleece as a backing is that it slips a LOT, so I needed to stabilise the two layers. Then I used the plaid fabric in the alternate blocks as my inspiration and based the stitching in these blocks on a variation of that, using different sorts of cross-hatching motifs in each of those blocks. To counteract the geometric nature of the quilting in those blocks, I used curved motifs in the other blocks, finishing with a star in the centre.

Then I stitched the borders of each block with wobbly lines (yes, they are deliberate!), and stitched big circles/pebbles/bubbles in the outer border. I didn’t stitch the beige inner border at all.

I used the same variegated green thread for all the stitching.

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Threads used:

• Top: Fil-Tec ‘Affinity’ (40 wt trilobal polyester, colour 60293 ‘Forest’)
• Bottom: Wonderfil Invisifil (100 wt, colour IF202 [red])

I volunteered to do some quilting at the Community Quilts stand at the annual QuiltWest exhibition, and in the few hours I was there, I quilted a complete quilt and about half of another one, before I was called away to do White Glove and take-down duties.

I finished the other half of the partially completed one this past weekend. At the Community Quilts stand, I was using a Bernina and some supplied thread (a soft variegated pink of unknown composition, though I suspect cotton). Once at home, I used my Handi Quilter Sweet Sixteen machine to finish the quilting and a similar variegated pink thread, though from a different manufacturer.

As this quilt was very busy with lots of floral fabrics, I decided to quilt it using a ‘flower’ version of my ‘open headbands‘ motif — same as that motif, but instead of a curved line for the second arc, I just add in some petal-like mini-arcs, giving a floral effect (see the picture of the back of the quilt for details). I was talking to people as I was quilting so I wanted to make sure I was using a design for which I had a lot of ‘muscle memory’ so that I could carry on a conversation without worrying too much about the quilting.

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Back:

Threads used:

• Top: Fil-Tec ‘Affinity’ (40 wt trilobal polyester, colour 60149 ‘Mauve’)
• Bottom: unknown beige cotton (at Community Quilts stand) and Fil-Tec Magna Glide pre-wound bobbin (white)

I started and finished this one at the Community Quilts stand at QuiltWest, so I was talking about my design choices and how I did the FMQ’ing as I was quilting it. That was an interesting experience. Even more interesting, Sandra, the lady who made the quilt top, came and watch me work on it too, then came back when it was finished to get a photo of it.

I can’t tell you what threads I used as I didn’t write them down. But as I was at the Craft Fair doing this, I was using a Bernina 750 Quilters Edition sewing machine, not my usual Sweet 16.

Because I was demonstrating, I needed to do a design that I had a lot of ‘muscle memory’ for, so I did my open headbands. That way, I didn’t need to concentrate on my quilting so much if I was talking. And because the fabrics in this quilt were so ‘busy’, I didn’t want to do a complex design to detract from the fabrics.

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Sandra and her quilted quilt!

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