Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Some 25 or so ladies involved in the Community Quilts program I quilt for had a ‘bee’ in Perth on Sunday 30 June. I’ve never been to one before, so thought it was time to make an appearance. I loaded my Sweet Sixteen into the car the night before, and left home about 7:30am to arrive at ‘Craft House’ at Alexander Park in Menora just after 9:00am. I quilted two quilts during the day, ate some lovely morning and afternoon tea goodies baked by some of the ladies, and met some lovely people.

It was quite amazing how much can get done when a group is working together. Some ladies sewed blocks, others made and sewed on binding, and others made and pin basted quilt sandwiches on the large centre tables. I took home another six quilts with me to quilt, and handed off about eight back to Gwen, the current Community Quilts organiser.

I had a lovely day, and the weather was perfect for driving too and from Perth too — a gorgeous clear and sunny winter’s day, with dry roads.

Here are some photos I took on the day, in between quilting quilts.

Gwen and Pat (?) sharing a laugh

Busy, busy

Centre tables for basting

Busy beavers! Daughters, mothers, grandmothers…

Trying to find fabric for a binding from the boxes of donated fabrics

Quilt #91 sitting on my Sweet Sixteen

Well, I don’t think I’ll get to 100 quilts in 12 months, though I’m close with 90 (I started quilting Community Quilts at the end of June 2012). This one is #90 and was originally going to be quilted by a friend of mine, but she’s sold her house and is in the process of packing and moving. I know what that’s like, so I offered to do it instead.

This was a nice little eye-spy quilt, with lots of bright colours that went well together. I decided to do an all-over design — my ‘squared off’ open headband motif. In keeping with the bright colours in the coloured blocks, I used a variegated thread I’ve had forever, in the red, blue, yellow, and green.

Even though the quilting is quite dominant, I quite liked how it turned out and how the thread choice complements the coloured blocks.

(Click a photo to view it larger)

Threads used:

• Top: I have no idea! It was a thread I’ve had for a long time and any identification on the spool has long gone.
• Bobbin: Wonderfil Invisifil (red, 100 wt, colour IF 202)

This was a very old-fashioned quilt top — an old-fashioned block, old fabrics, and all the star blocks were hand-sewn. How to quilt it?

I started by stitching in the ditch ESS (‘every stinking seam’) — well, not quite every seam, but almost!

Next, were the white spaces. The area where the points all met in the middle was very bumpy for each block, so I needed something to flatten it. I decided to do a stylised flower, using a fairly close spiral for the centre, then radiating out following the shape of the white space for the petals, with a centre vein (these blocks were puffy too), and a couple of swirly bits on the side, followed by an echo line around the outside of the petals. I used a matching 80 wt thread for these as I didn’t want them to stand out too much.

But what to do about those 8-pointed stars? First I stitched in the ditch with an invisible thread through each one to reduce the puffiness and to stabilise them for the big spiral centre — I’ve done big spirals before without stabilising the layers first and ended up with weird effects, a bit like the ‘pointy bras’ of yesteryear that my Mum used to wear ;-). Next, I used the top off a container as my circle to mark the outer line with chalk. Then I stitched around the circle with a variegated mauve/purple/lemon/tan thread, then stitched another ring about 1/4″ from the outer ring, then I spiralled in to the centre and out again. Once I was back on the outer ring of the circle, I stitched flame-style ‘petals’ around the circle with the points almost touching the edges of the start. I thought they looked a bit like sunflowers when I was finished, and I was pleased with how they turned out.

Click on a photo to view it larger.

Threads used:

• Top: Wonderfil Deco-Bob (beige, 80 wt, colour DB 112); Wonderfil Mirage (30 wt, colour SD 32)
• Bobbin: Wonderfil Invisifil (lime green, 100 wt, colour IF 702)

What gorgeous colours and fabrics were in this quilt! All those rich reds, and I think some of the fabrics were heavy silks too. The backing fabric was in a deep navy/black with a Kokopelli symbol. Unfortunately, the reds just don’t come out well in the photsos.

For this quilt, I decided to do an all over design using a rich red thread. I wanted to capture the feel of the grasses in one of the fabrics, so did a sort of grassy motif, which was really just a very open version of the open headbands motif I use a lot.

(Click on a photo to view it larger)

Threads used:

• Top: Floriani embroidery thread (40 wt rayon, colour PF188)
• Bobbin: Wonderfil Invisifil (red, 100 wt, colour IF 202)

I didn’t particularly like this quilt (non-one says I have to like them!), though the child who gets it will probably love it to death as there’s a lot going on in each block. It’s a perfect ‘I spy’ quilt.

As the quilt fabrics were so busy, I just did an all-over squared off ‘open headband’ motif. However, I had a great deal of difficulty in keeping this quilt from puckering. My tension was fine — the problem was that the quilt wasn’t a quilt sandwich with proper batting inside it. The quilt top had been laid directly onto the backing fabric, which was a polar fleece. It was as a slippery as anything on my quilting machine table, and it puckered as I stitched.

The one consolation is that the puckering is reasonably even, so perhaps the recipient will think that’s how it’s meant to be 😉

(Click on a photo to view it larger)

Threads used:

• Top: Madeira rayon (aqua blue)
• Bobbin: Wonderfil Invisifil (lime green, 100 wt, colour IF 702)

This was such a cute quilt! All those spotted owls… The Community Quilt Coordinator gave it to me hoping I’d do a great job on it — I hope it lives up to your expectations, Gwen 😉

This quilt took me 8+ hours to quilt. First I stitched ESS (‘every stinking seam’ [from Cindy Needham]) in invisible thread, and I mean EVERY stinking seam… including around all the applique pieces of each owl. Then I used a variegated green thread to stitch a different filler motif in each block. I quite like how the different stitches give different personalities to the owls — the black one, for example, looks like he’s scared.

In keeping with the owl theme, I stitched really long bird feathers from the centre of each border out to the corners. I tried something different for these feathers — I put TWO different threads in the top, using a size 18 needle to make sure they had enough room to pass through. I thought I’d get a lot of breakage or shredding, but I got very little. The combination of the fluoro orange and the yellow thread came out a really nice yellow orangey colour.

I was quite pleased with how the whole quilt turned out. There’s a cute frog fabric on the back too 😉

(Click on a photo to view it larger)

Threads used:

• Top: Fil-Tec ‘Affinity’ (‘Chartru’, colour #60156, 40 wt, variegated polyester); Fil-Tec ‘Glide’ (‘Neon Orange’, colour #90811, 40 wt, polyester); Fil-Tec ‘Glide’ (‘Marigold’, colour #80130, 40 wt, polyester)
• Bobbin: Wonderfil Invisifil (100 wt, lime green, colour IF 702)

I started this one at the ‘sit and sew’ stations at QuiltWest two weekends ago, and finished it last weekend. I’ve been super busy at work, so it’s taken all week to get the photos taken and posted.

Just a simple heart and loop motif for this one, to match the blue appliqued hearts. All stitched in a white cotton thread (I think I use white Bobbinfil on the top and bottom).

This pretty quilt was a real challenge. The first challenge was how to quilt it, the second was how to deal with some of the very bulky 3D objects, and the third challenge was what to do about the unfortunate rust-type staining on some of the blocks.

Before I stitched any of the main designs, I stitched in the ditch with invisible thread around EVERY single applique motif. Yes, there were a lot… This took several hours.

I tried removing the worst stain with some dishwashing liquid, but while that dulled the stain a little, it didn’t take it out. I sure wasn’t going to wash this quilt as there were a LOT of red fabrics in it and also red thread used for hand embroidery — if only one of those reds ran, I’d be in a worse situation than when I started. So I decided to leave the stains and hope that someone else has a good idea on how to deal with them, or that no-one else will notice them 😉

The very bulky 3D objects (especially the chrysanthemums in the centre block) were hard to get around and I got my open-toe hopping foot caught in them a couple of times, so, where I could, I backed into these objects to avoid creating havoc.

But the big challenge was how to quilt this quilt. The blocks were really big (18″ square) and there was a lot of white space surrounding each of the hand-appliqued motifs. I decided on a circle around each, but puzzled over what circular household object I had that was big enough for me to make a circle template. Nothing… So I sent my brain further afield to the shed where I remembered that we had a rock/soil sieve that was large and circular. Off to the shed… Yep — that worked! I pulled apart a 30-pack Diet Coke carton and drew two circles on it with a Sharpie — one for the larger circle at the top of the sieve (nearly 16″ diameter) and the other for the smaller base of the sieve (~13″ diameter). I then cut the templates out of the cardboard and laid them over the motifs. Initially I was going to use the larger one, but decided on the smaller one as I could get an under/over effect with it on almost all the applique designs; with the larger one, almost every design was going to be inside the circle.

I then used an ordinary 2B pencil to lightly trace around the template on each motif — light enough to see the pencil lines when I was stitching, but not enough for them to show once stitched. Then I used an off-white thread to stitch each circle along the marked lines. Then I braved ‘winging’ it by eyeballing a stitching line 1/4″ outside the main circle, thus creating a circular border. Some of the lines were a little wobbly, but I was pretty pleased with them overall.

Next came the decisions about how to quilt inside each circle — or whether to leave the insides unstitched and only stitch the areas outside the circles. I decided on stitching inside the circles, and while I initially thought I’d quilt outside the circles too, I decided not to once I’d quilted the insides, as I thought it would be overkill. Of course, each motif was different — should I use the same quilting stitch inside every circle, or vary it according to the design of the motif?

The end results are below. I’m pretty please with how they turned out, but they took much longer than I thought they would — I guess I spent about eight to twelve hours quilting all the blocks, in addition to the time spent stitching in the ditch.

Finally, what to do with the red sashing and the borders… I went with something very simple here so as to not draw the eye away from the centres of each block, and just did a straight line box around each block, some 1/2″ inside the block (in off-white), stitch-in-the-ditch at each seam (also in off-white), and 1/2″ outside the block (in red thread).

(Click on a photo to view each block in detail)

Threads used:

• Top: Off-white: Fil-Tec Glide (40 wt, trilobal polyester, colour ‘Linen’ #10WG1); Red: Fil-Tec Glide (40 wt, trilobal polyester, colour ‘Cardinal’ #70001); Green (for the holly stems): Robison-Anton (40 wt, rayon, colour ‘Evergreen’ #2315)
• Bobbin: Invisifil (100 wt, beige)