Clarity Ruler Foot

Very excited...my new Ruler foot arrived from the US. This is the Clarity Ruler foot from Accents In Design

 

 

Completely 'see through' and comes with a little washer. The washer is optional and did not fit my machine (Pfaff QE 4.2) but as it turned out I don't seem to need it anyway. I attached the foot with one of my bigger screws from another foot I have. This was simply because the screw is easier to attach. The normal screw fits just as well. Attaching the foot was easy...you just follow the steps of the enclosed pamphlet and presto...

Here is the foot attached (excuse the crusty mat...I definitely need a replacement as you can see). In terms of adjustments there are only two things that you need to do 1) lower the ruler foot until it just glides across your quilting top and 2) center your needle in the middle of the foot (on the Pfaff 4.2 the needle setting was at +1). And then it's time to try this out and make sure that the stitching is right. Here is the extent of my adjustments

I am including this to show you that it does not take that long to get the setting right...for me it was mainly making sure that I had the foot at the right height, particularly when going backwards. The Pfaff machine can be a bit finicky going backwards and once the backward stitching had no skipped stitches, I had the adjustment right.



Next I stitched this out

Love this foot! It was so easy to stitch with some precision due to the 'see through' nature of the foot and this example brought this out beautifully.

Getting a bit sick of always stitching out practice pieces I decided to finish off a little something that I had lying around for a while. When making some baskets from an Accuquilt pattern I had these beautiful 4" batik squares left over. I had sewn them together with some sashing not really knowing what to do with them next...perfect to practice some ruler work on. This will now become a little mat for the cat.

I first stitched-in-the-ditch all around the squares with the straight Accents In Design ruler. Never done that before...this worked fantastic and was a real time saver. Really enjoyed doing this...

 As you can see I tried some other rulers out on this as well from the Westalee range. Now, this is not recommended by the makers of the ruler foot as they are thinner in height and I certainly would recommend caution with this. However as these rulers are out there, people will try this...I think it is easier when you have a thinner batting like I had on this piece as there is very little chance of the ruler slipping under the ruler if you watch it and be very aware of the damage that you could do. So in doing this I went very slowly and was very careful. Also got in the habit of aligning my ruler foot first against the ruler where I wanted to start to stitch, then flicking the ruler out of the way, taking the first stitch to bring up the thread, securing the stitch, needle down and only then re-aligning my ruler against the foot again. This acted a bit as a safeguard to avoid accidentally bringing the foot down when the ruler was in the way.
Overall I must say that I preferred the Accents In Design ruler because of its height and the handles that it has got. I might have to look at getting some thicker rulers for this foot.
Anyway, I had some fun with trying this out...my only problem was my inexperience with rulers and reading the lines correctly. For the life of me, I did not seem to get the alignment right most of the time and also experienced the ruler slipping away at times...but that is just practice. The foot itself is brilliant...you can see where you are going and the stitching itself felt effortless...the foot also stitches beautifully without the ruler, so that you can fill in areas as you go along. Backstitching in particular was easy with this foot. I really liked it.
I then went on my quilt...you know that one that has been sitting around for a year. Was curious on how difficult it would be to use the rulers on that.

I am not going to say that this was easy...it wasn't! The difficulty though was not the foot, but rather  the alignment of that little arc ruler that I have, as I had to eyeball the alignment and I am really not used to that. Also had to work out a way of stitching this out so that the ruler was where I could actually see it. Also, this is quite a puffy piece, so I went extra carefully along...worked well actually, only had a few wonky stitches here and there when the ruler was moving away or I inexplicably did not follow the ruler.

Overall impression...really like this ruler foot...I can see better where I am going and the foot has a similar feel to my other FMQ feet, so the stitching feels quite natural. I had no issues with adjustment whatsoever, however, in fairness this might also have been because I already fiddled for a while with the other ruler foot I have, hence already had a sense of what I needed to adjust.

So maybe now I will complete this quilt...those continuous curves look great, however they are thinner than the ones I had marked in by hand, so this will be fairly noticeable as I already had done one third of the squares...well, I decided yesterday that that cannot be helped...if I wait until I marked everything this will never get finished.

Karin