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

New baby quilt

I have been steadily working away on 3 different quilts. Yes, why do one if you can do several at once!

Finished my baby quilt. This one is made out of charm squares and gave me a bit of a headache as I also had obtained a packet of 2 1/2in squares in the same range, somehow thinking that they would make up 4 1/2in squares. Well, they obviously don't and after a lot of internet surfing I finally came up with a combination of designs.

I found the idea with the stars in the center on Pinterest...Vanessa Christensen from the V and Co blog. She had the charm squares and stars arranged this way in a small quilt in some greenish tones. Very pretty. I added some additional borders to use up my 2 1/2in squares...EQ7 came again very handy as the math just did not add up and I needed to do some tweaking. To my big surprise this worked out very well. 

The quilt is by now spray basted and ready to go! Spray basting was definitely a first for me...not sure I like it...got it all over my feet and then spread it all over the floor...bit messy. But I have got something special in mind for this one and spray basting was the better option.

I am planning to do an edge to edge design on it on my HQ Sweet 16. We learned about this in the group I am attending and given that I am really bored with my allover designs this seemed a great option. I selected a design from the EQ Quilting Designs Add-on Program Volume 8 called 'Mini Moonflower Design'. Got very enthused about this and tried it out on a piece of white cotton

While not the most exciting design I thought that this was simple enough to trial on this quilt. I think it suits this little quilt.
In between of course, EQ8 came out and I had to shift my baby quilt from EQ7 to EQ8...today I spent some time on it trying to work out the size of the design and most importantly the placement. While this is all do-able, a bit of planning is a must, particularly as this design is straight across in very definite rows, so I had to make sure it does not sit on every seam line and looks well spread out while still appearing as a consistent overall E2E pattern. The motif consists of 2 rows of flowers and I ended up making this eventually 10in high. The next issue was to pay some attention to the edges and the spacing. EQ 8 was enormously helpful with this...

I worked in Zoom mode and placed my motif where I could effortlessly start...also used that little ruler in EQ8 to measure the approx. distance at points so I have an approximate for placement. I then exported the image using the 'Export Marquee Selection' and pasted it into a Word document, so I can have a look at it when placing the motif on the quilt.

So now I have got a picture of the top left corner and the top right as well as the bottom. Also took an image of the approximate spacing which will be about 1/2in.

Now it is just a matter of doing it! The motif will be stitched out using Golden Threads paper and I will most likely do this in sections. My only fear is that this might not end up straight across for some reason. Well, we shall see...


If this works out I might get some simple pantographs to expand my options a bit in terms of overall designs. Found some really nice ones on the Golden Threads web site. Lots of possibilities!

Karin