Rhonda Bracey: At Random

I finished the last of the latest batch of 10 community quilts today.

I had quite a bit of difficulty deciding how to quilt this quilt as there was a lot going on in it. Eventually, I decided to stitch in the ditch along the diagonals of the coloured areas hoping that I’d get inspiration for the rest of the quilt. After doing that, I was still stumped! So I decided to emphasise a small element of the quilt — the cream vertical bars. Again, I stitched in the ditch, extending the stitching from one vertical bar to the next (I used my Line Tamer ruler to stitch all these straight lines — using this ruler is much quicker for me than trying to stitch straight lines on the Sweet Sixteen without it).

Once I’d done the vertical lines, I figured that that was enough quilting for the main quilt top. The last stage was to quilt the ‘white space’ in the border around the appliqued flowers. I decided on a leaf motif (with loops), in keeping with the floral theme in the border. I continued using the same thread I’d used for the rest of the quilt.

Threads used:

• Top: Fil-Tec Glide, cream (colour 20001; 40 wt)
• Bobbin: Rheingold Bobbinfil (by Madeira) (white, 70 wt)

Click on a photo to view it larger.

A quilt entirely made of scrappy strips…. And fabric scraps from many of the past five or more decades too, I think! I suspect that some of these fabrics were from the 1940s or 50s. Others were definitely from the 60s and 70s, while still others were likely from the 80s and 90s. I’m not sure there were many/any fabrics in this quilt top that were more recent than the 1990s!

As an example, the yellow, blue and pink fabric strip in this photo is likely a fabric from the 40s or 50s, and the others surrounding it are probably from the 60s or 70s, while the really bright crocodile/hippo one is likely from the 80s or 90s (click on a photo to see it larger):

And there was no order to how these strips were put together — lights were with other lights, or mediums, or darks…; colours were placed at random; and fabric styles were also random. Viewed as a whole, this quilt is actually quite nice, but up close it didn’t do much for me 😉

How to quilt it? I was tempted to take the easy way out and do any all-over design like open headbands or a large meandering stipple. But then I wondered how I’d tackle the black border. So I decided to emphasise the strips.

I started from approximately the middle and using my Line Tamer ruler I stitched out to the edge, stitching in the ditch as far as possible (some strips were wonky, so I did the best I could). When I got to the edge of the strips, I lined up the ruler with the black border’s seam to make sure I stitched out ot the edge perpendicular to the seam. I repeated this for each seam for some 10 or so strips. I then turned the quilt around and ditch stitched the other side of those stitching lines from the middle out.

Then I went back to the middle and started the strips on the other side of the centre, stitching from the middle about halfway along the length of a strip out to the edge of the border. Again, I did about 10 or so strips, then turned the quilt around and did the opposite side of those half-done stitching lines.

And kept on until I reached the top and bottom edges of the quilt.

Then I came back and started again in the middle, this time stitching a centre line between each of the stitching lines I’d already created. This resulted in a parallel stitching line about every 1/2 to 3/4 inch apart.

The effect I was looking for was a ‘modern quilt‘ look. Many ‘modern quilts’ that I’ve seen in magazines and on the internet use a lot of parallel straight stitching and very geometric squares, rectangles, etc. — I thought parallel stitching it would be an interesting effect with these old fabrics.

I was pleased with the final result. When the stitching only followed the seams, there was something missing. Adding the lines of stitching between the seams fixed that. I was pleased with how it turned out.

Threads used:

• Top: Fil-Tec Harmony variegated pastels — yellow, pink, blue, and green (40 wt cotton; colour ‘Spring’ #14062)
• Bobbin: charcoal Wonderfil Deco-Bob (80 wt; colour DB 122)

This was a very detailed applique quilt — someone had spent many hours making it. And I spent many hours quilting it! (I suspect about 10 hours in total).

I started with the centerpiece by echo quilting the words, then I used tight McTavishing to fill in the rest of the background of this centre, thus ‘popping’ the appliqued flowers (click on a photo to view it larger)

I stippled the background of the remainder of the applique sections, with a tight small stippling stitch, again to ‘pop’ the appliqued elements.

For the star blocks, I used a few different elements. I wanted to try out the spiral design from the November Free Motion Quilting Challenge, so there are quite a few spirals in these star blocks 😉

I stitched all the cream areas with Superior Threads’ King Tut “Papyrus” (colour 972), and used the same bobbin throughout (Deco Bob DB 115).

I decided not to quilt the sashing as there was already a lot of quilting on this quilt. However, the borders needed to be stablised, so I quilted a continuous run of spirals in them using Isacord thread (colour 4133). However, I didn’t take a photo as these spirals were almost impossible to see against the teal floral fabric.

The finished quilt:

This was just a small (42 x 42 inch) quilt. It was pretty busy with all those pinwheels, so I decided to follow the straight lines and extend them through the pinwheels. That left some quite large empty blue squares, so I did a freehand diamond spiral in them.

I can’t remember what threads I used for this one! But I think it was a plain mid-to-dark blue for all the stitching on the top of the quilt. And yes, I used a ruler for all those straight lines — my favourite Line Tamer ruler.

Click on a photo to view it larger.