Rhonda Bracey: At Random

The next quilt top I worked on at the retreat was one I called ‘fractured diamonds’. None of the other girls liked it, and I wasn’t too fussed about either the fabrics used or the offset diamonds. However, it was a quilt top that needed quilting, so the only decision I had to make was how to quilt it.

Glenys suggested that I do diamond ‘spirals’, so I did — on all the diamonds (blue water fabric, autumn leaves brown fabric, and the cream areas in between). I used variegated threads for the coloured diamonds and a plain cream thread for the background.

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Prior to our weekend quilting retreat, I’d stitched part of this quilt — I’d gone around the edges of all the hand-appliqued pieces in the Dresden fans (flowers) with invisible thread just to hold them in place properly. I’d also stitched the centres of each ‘flower’ in a stylised sunflower/Fibonacci spiral (yes, I made it up!).

So all I had to do on the retreat was decide how to quilt the big open yellow spaces. Glenys suggested emulating the centres of the flowers in the yellow blocks — I thought that was a great idea, so did so, then stitched flower petals to attach to the centre, making sure each petal point matched a particular point on the fans.

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This was such a gorgeous quilt top! The colours, the fact that it was perfectly straight, and the gorgeous tones of the beige fabrics blended so well that the light and dark beiges were hard to distinguish. The backing was the same dark blue fabric as the darkest blue in the log cabins, and had a panel of these same log cabin blocks through the centre of the backing.

How to quilt this so that the lovely top was enhanced? Well, it was obvious that I’d use a beige thread in the beige areas — that was a given. But the choice of motif was a little harder to decide. First though, were the blue parts of the log cabins. I saw art deco and Navajo Indian motifs in the straight lines, so to really emphasise the straightness, I marked and stitched circles (!), bringing out even more the art deco/Navajo elements that I already saw.

I then stitched in the ditch and in the centre of the blue bars down to the largest circle and in parts of the inner circle too. I used a navy thread in the top (no I don’t recall which one — I quilted six community quilts quilts over my quilt retreat weekend and didn’t keep track of my threads), with a matching navy bobbin thread.

Finally, I decided on a simple wave motif for the beige areas and quilted those after I’d completed all the blue areas.

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Back:

This quilt top had lots of pinks and greens and florals. It also had a lot of even 9″ blocks — some full pieces of fabric, others of half pieces, while the remainder were 4- or 9-patch blocks. What to do?

First, I choose the possible thread colours, settling on a bright pink rayon for the large flower motifs. Yes, I decided to fill each block with a large free-form flower that had petals going out to each corner and centre side of each block. Later I decided to add small ‘bubbles’ in the centre of each flower, also in pink, though perhaps I could have done those in yellow.

After I’d quilted the large flowers, I felt the quilt needed something to make those flowers pop. This quilting had to be subtle and reasonably dense to allow the flower petals to puff out. So I chose a soft green thread and echo quilted each petal in it, then filled the remaining space with a small-ish stipple in the same green thread. The backing fabric was pretty pink floral on white, so I used a soft pink in the bobbin. I was glad I decided to echo quilt the petals as I think that adds quite a bit of subtle emphasis to the petals.

There are more than 130,000 stitches in this quilt.

Threads used:

• Pink: Floriani, 40 wt rayon, colour: PF106
• Green: Isacord, 40 wt polyester, colour Fb 5650 ‘Spring Frost’
• Bobbin: Wonderfil Deco-Bob, 80 wt, colour DB 205

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This one was awkward. The quilt top was in colours that didn’t ‘speak’ to me, and in fabrics that I would never choose. In addition, all the setting triangles and possibly the main ‘diamonds’ were cut on the bias, so this quilt top was very wonky and wouldn’t sit flat, no matter what I did. There was a lot of puckering overall, and within the individual diamonds (had they been cut on the square and with the grain, then stitched, I might have had a fighting chance…).

As a result, my main objective in quilting this quilt was to ‘beat it into submission’ and get rid of all the wonky bits by quilting it fairly heavily. Even so, there were a couple of places where I still ended up with some puckers, and one place where I had to tuck an excess piece of fabric under at the seam to avoid a pleat.

All these bias issues meant that this was not a quilt that was going to lend itself to feature quilting in each square. An all over design was needed! As the fabrics were nearly all small florals I went with a 5-petal flower and small leaf motif.

With such a tight motif, I needed to use a thread that blended with the fabric and didn’t show easily. I chose a Superior Thread ‘Rainbows’ variegated thread in pink, tan, olive, and cream (40 wt, colour #806), and for the bobbin I used a Superior Threads King Tut cream thread (40 wt, ‘Papyrus’ — colour #972).

I ended up doing 170,000 quilting stitches, taking between 6 and 8 hours (I didn’t measure my time, but it was over two days).

Click on a photo to see it larger.

Back:

What a brightly coloured quilt top this was! I decided to quilt it with all-over feathers, using several different variegated threads to match the colour panels of the top. The backing fabric was a plain calico.

These photos were taken before I squared off the quilt ready for binding, so you can see a little of the batting at the edges.

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Threads used:

• Superior Threads spool of an unknown colour (pale blue and tan mix) that came with my Sweet Sixteen; I finished the last of this spool. This was the same thread I used for some practice pieces when I first got my Sweet Sixteen.
• Superior Threads Rainbows; 40 wt, colour 829 (orange, tan, cream variegated)
• Superior Threads King Tut; 40 wt; colour 943 ‘Nile Crocodile’ (yellow, olive, and green variegated)
• Superior Threads King Tut; 40 wt; colour 932 ‘Cairo’ (purple, pink,blue, and green variegated)
• Wonderfil Silco; colour #SCM03 (pastel pink, yellow, blue and green variegated)
• Bobbin: Wonderfil Deco-Bob; 80 wt; colour DB 112
• Stitches in the quilting: 177,000

And the back: