Rhonda Bracey: At Random

I learned to quilt back in the late 1980s. After making a few quilts, I stopped when life, work, etc. got in the way. One of the quilts I made back in the 1980s was this one, photographed in 2006 when our house in Perth was for sale:

There was a lot wrong with it, including the horrible hand-quilted stitches I did in black thread on white. Yes, there was a time when I hand-quilted… long before I knew you could quilt on a machine! The stitches looked OK on the front, but they were shockers on the back. I remember stitching this big quilt inside a 16″ quilting hoop… I must’ve been MAD.

Here are some ‘before’ pictures of this quilt, including the embarrassing stitches on the back:

As I was out of Community Quilts to quilt over the summer break while the coordinator was taking a well-deserved break, I decided to tackle this old quilt to try to breathe some life back into it.

The first task was to stitch in the ditch around all the blocks and all the arms of each star. I started with invisible thread, but it kept snapping, so as my patience was wearing thin, I decided not to persevere with it and swapped to a slightly off-white thread (with black inside the stars).

Once I’d outlined all the main elements, I unpicked much of the hand stitching. That was a thankless task! And very time consuming. I was better than I thought back in the day and had knotted the stitches every six or so, which meant I couldn’t get a run on pulling out snipped stitches from one end. <sigh>

I decided to quilt the start blocks with McTavishing, making sure that I went up to but didn’t go into the little stars. I left the hand stitching on those.

For the main border, I stitched lots of hearts and loops, again leaving the big hearts and the hand stitching for those. I didn’t quilt the black sashing strips or the maroon keystone pieces (in the sashing and the main border).

A couple of things that I noticed when revisiting this quilt:

• Who knows what batting I used in it! It was quite puffy, so it was probably a polyester wadding. It was puffy in some places, thin in others, overlapping in others (I could feel the overlaps), and non-existent in others mostly at the other border where I had obviously run out!
• The binding was done with bias strips (who uses those anymore?) and was very uneven. In fact the whole outer border was a bit of a mess, so I didn’t try to quilt it. I left it as it was, though I did stitch in the ditch in the borders.
• Puckering was obvious once I started quilting. It was probably a result of not cutting correctly on the grain. Where possible I either stitched it into submission or left it if at the outer border.
• Marks on the fabric. There were a few marks on the fabric that looked like rust. As this quilt has hardly been used, who knows where they came from or how long they’ve been there. I didn’t try to remove them.
• Colour fastness. I was surprised how well the colours have stood the test of time. None of the fabrics or the black thread appeared to have faded and none of the black thread I removed left any black dye. I doubt these fabrics were made or treated the same way as quilting cottons today, and it’s likely that some were just cottons from a fabric store, not special quilting fabrics.

I was quite pleased with the end result.

Well, I only needed 400 squares for my scrappy quilt — 100 for each block. Making it 2 x 3 blocks would’ve made it HUGE, so as I wanted a lap quilt I stopped at 4 blocks (actually I made 5, and intend putting the 5th one on the back as a snuggly place for my feet in winter, like the old quillows).

With the sashing borders, more squares outside the sashing, and the main borders, this quilt is about 64 x 64 inches… plenty big enough for wrapping around me in winter (though it’s hard to think of winter when it’s close to 40C [104F] outside at the moment!).

Here’s a photo of one finished block, with the inner sashing border and the outer squares:

I’ve since added a wider yellow border in the same fabric as the sashing fabric around each block and put it all together ready for quilting. Actually, I started the quilting today, but I won’t take any more photos until I’ve finished it.

While white would have been a better choice to set off the multi-coloured blocks, I decided to use only fabric from my stash and NOT buy any more. I had a few metres of this lovely clear yellow batik I purchased in Bali a year or so ago, and it looked fine when I auditioned it against the blocks, so I went with that. Besides, a quilt that is in heavy use in the living room while watching TV and potentially drinking red wine or eating a snack is just asking for spillage if I did it in white!

The backing fabric as also from Bali, but that will remain a surprise until I finish it and take the photos.

I’m in the process of making a lap quilt from my scrap fabrics. I bought a Go! Cutter with a 2.5 inch square die to cut the hundreds of 2.5 inch squares I need for this quilt. The pattern I’m using is this one: http://weddingdressblue.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/100-patch-quilt-tutorial/

The first step in the process was to cut out hundreds of squares! I counted up how many I cut, and it came to more than 2000, and still I had scraps left over. I didn’t touch my fabric stash at all. Using the Go! Cutter saved my sanity — you can cut up to 54 squares at a time and they are ALL the same size and ALL correct. I put them into ziplock bags according to colour and then I left them for a few weeks until I got inspired to start stitching them together. (And to avoid this mammoth task in the future, now when I have offcuts from a quilt, I save the larger pieces and put the smaller ones through the Go! Cutter then add them to the relevant coloured baggie. Even smaller ones either then go into the bin, or I donate them to the local library for their children’s craft activities over the school holidays — small offcuts of wadding make great sheep and snow!)

Squares in baggies AFTER I’d used up 1160 of them!

I grabbed two pieces from the baggies, then stitched them, chain stitching the next two and so on. I stopped stitching at about 580 pairs, and STILL I have hundreds of 2.5 inch squares left over! If I need more, I’ll just raid my baggies of squares…

I call these long chain stitched pairs my ‘prayer flags’ as they remind me of the prayer flags in Nepal

The next step was ironing each pair open and snipping the joining threads. What a mindless task that was! Now I had a cutting table covered in pairs of squares…

Yes, I counted how many pairs I had — see notebook on the right.

After a few more days/weeks of avoiding the next task, I got into it while I was on leave just before Christmas. And that task was deciding how to put these pairs together. It would be easy to just grab a pair and then stitch the next pair I grabbed to it, but I wanted to make sure I had a balance of lights and darks, brights and pastels, etc. so I placed the pairs on my design board (thank goodness for that design board — this task would have been a nightmare otherwise).

Once I was happy with the ‘randomness’ of colours, tonal values etc., I stitched the first row of 10 squares (5 pairs) together, then pinned them back up. Then the next row and the next until all 10 rows were stitched.

Next came more pressing, this time pressing all the seams in one row the same way, then in the opposite direction for the next row and so on until all 10 rows were pressed. I pinned each row back up on the design board as it was pressed.

Next came joining rows 1 and 2 together, then 3 and 4, 5 and 6 and so on, nesting the seams together, and pressing the new seam in one direction.

I now had 5 pairs of rows of 10, so these had to be stitched together too, and the seams pressed.

Finally I had a single block of 100 squares!

I think I’ll need six 100-square blocks for my lap quilt — 2 across, and 3 down. That’s only 600 squares from my stash of 2000+ 2.5 inch squares….

More details as I create the quilt…

Already I reckon I’m about 10 hours (or more) into it, with many more hours to go. Anyone who thinks that paying $300 for a hand-made quilt at a craft fair is too much, has NO idea of how much time and effort goes into it (see this blog post for the costings for a quilt I made a couple of years ago: https://rhondabracey.com/2011/11/06/cost-of-craft-work/).

See also: https://rhondabracey.com/2014/01/28/scrappy-quilt-finished/