Playing with Rulers

I like to push the boundaries a bit with my sitdown longarm, i.e. see what else I can do on there and how difficult (or not) is it to push my quilt through the machine with the latest ideas I have. Given that I have a draw full of rulers I am always looking for new ideas to use my rulers to complete allover designs.

I recently picked up a panel quilt from the charity group I am involved in. The panel is "Elsa" from Frozen. The quilt is a little bit bigger than the usual baby quilt and measures approx. 47in x 55in. In the past I have often finished those types of quilts with clamshells using the HQ Clamshell ruler. Fun to do and relatively quick. For this one though that would have been too small and I needed another idea. Looked through my draw and decided to use one of Amanda Murphy's circle rulers to do a big Orange Peel design over the quilt.

I picked the 7in circle and started...literally regretted my choice straight away. The 7in ruler fits my whole hand. Thinking I would just go around and around I thought that this would be quick and easy. Wrong! The ruler shifted of course with the movement of the quilt. As you have to backtrack over one part of the circle as you move along that became quite difficult, particularly starting off with the batting making everything more wobbly and moveable. I struggled big time...

Solution: those little rubbery draw liners. Cut myself two pieces off and placed them under the ruler for every circle I did.

So much for quickly quilting this out, but at least my backtracking worked out nicely. The size of the ruler made it challenging to move along, but as I now was committed to finishing this off, I had to think this through a bit better. An added challenge was the wool batting. It does give you a fair amount of loft, so I had to concentrate and go slowly to ensure my hopping foot stayed on the side of the ruler. The way I quilted around the ruler involved shifting my hands constantly to hold the ruler next to the foot steady while at the same time adjusting the quilt a number of times as it was always shifting sideways as I went around the ruler. All this while holding the ruler in exactly the same place to get the backtracking right.

Must say I was not confident that this would work. A few rows in I measured where I was up to in relation to the bottom edge. I was pretty sure that my circles were not straight across and that I had lost my way. To my surprise I was spot on...same distance on both sides. This was encouraging!

Gave it a bit of a visual...not too bad. Not perfect by any means but overall looked quite good. Every now and then the shape in the middle of the circle looked a bit off center but that had to do with me not always hitting the exact point where the circles meet. I let go of worrying about that because there was just too much going on in terms of stitching, holding the quilt, avoiding drag and keeping the ruler steady.

Stitching along...

As per usual half way through I turned the quilt around and quilted the circles towards me. Struggled with the drag of the quilt at that point and also thought that my circles were really going out of alignment. Turning the quilt at that point is always good as you now pushing it in the opposite direction and those inaccuracies are starting to disappear.

Was very curious how I would go approaching the top of the quilt and prepared myself for an uneven finish. But, lo and behold...more or less finished evenly across the top. That was a bit surprising seeing the pushing and shoving I had to do... 

Took the basting out and had a close look but cannot take a photo at the moment as it is evening over here and the shots would come out too dark. Will post a shot of the finished quilt in another post. 

Overall happy with my efforts...looks fairly consistent even though my circles shifted slightly to the left but I don't think that that is noticeable once the binding is on as it is only by about a quarter inch.

Might try this again on a smaller quilt using the smaller 5in circle.

 

Karin