Let's Do Some Ruler Work #9

Another week has passed by...hope you are keeping busy and healthy. I have been playing on the new machine, finished off my HQ Group challenge project and am now onto the next thing.

I have made this little quilt in early January. It is my own pattern and you can grab it under above tab 'Free Patterns'. I have made this quilt several times, but each time given it away, so felt the need to do it again, particularly as I had that gorgeous hedgehog fabric. Looks totally different in different colours.

It's bold and colourful and I am still undecided how to quilt it. A while back I had seen Debbie Brown demonstrate a cool pattern at the Handiquilter Cyber Quilt Show to stitch with the Clamshell ruler which she called Spiral Mini. I thought that this would look great as an overall pattern. I stitched it a couple of times, but when looking at my quilt got hopelessly confused.

Here is the Clamshell Ruler...really like this one...easy to hold and good fun!

So, I drew the pattern on some fabric and tried to stitch this out to work out the alignment of the ruler.













Well, epic fail...got very confused when I tried to offset the spirals. I tried to follow the seams or so I thought...(sorry, photos are a bit dark, it is a very grey and rainy day over here)

Just could not work out the alignment and how far to go down for the next spiral, even offsetting them caused my brain to revolt.

So, out came the Ikea paper...clearly I did not understand how this pattern worked in terms of alignment. I again drew out my pattern first and equipped with one of those little stitching disks, drew out the spirals with the ruler.

Happy to say that this worked, I was able to understand the pattern, i.e. it shifts over about half an inch as you go along which actually makes sense once you are drawing it out and thinking about it. Also managed to figure out how far to go down to have about 1in space in between and offsetting them in an orderly way. Somehow could not get my head around this on the fabric in terms of which pretend seam to use to align the ruler exactly.

 Next issue though...my stitching is going to fall exactly on the seam lines as I go down in the pattern. While this looks ok on paper this is not ideal on the quilt. I am thinking of using the echo feet to make the spiral bigger, maybe just the 3/8in echo foot, that should be enough to get it off the seams. If I am not mistaken, that should make the spiral 1/2in bigger and shift everything down. Hmm...what does this mean for my alignment lines? Will have to have another trial with the echo foot on to see how that works. Or, reduce the space in between to just half an inch?
If all fails this quilt will just get an allover meander over it, because I am already thinking about the next project...the Heartfelt Wholecloth Quilt from the Ruler of the Month Club 5!

Time to link up...what have you been working on?

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Karin

E2E on HQ Sweet 16

Overcome my stage fright and finally went onto the quilt. See my previous post on my preparation for quilting E2E on the Sweet 16.

First section completed...I used my EQ program to guide me in the placement of the motif. As you can see I brought the design right up to the edge of the quilt with some of it going to be taken up by the binding. I did a lot of shifting the design to and fro in the program and this was the best way to align it so that I get a similar look of the motif at the bottom as well.

Action shot with the paper attached

Could you do this on a DSM...you probably could for a smallish quilt, however I do think the space around the HQ Sweet 16 makes this a lot easier. What you see here is me quilting from the top down going across from left to right, so as I am approaching the end of the edge I have got the bulk of the quilt to my right. This would be somewhat difficult under the DSM. I was also glad that I could have the paper lying nice and straight. Even though I attached it with masking tape where I could there is the potential of movement if you are not careful. As I went along I quilted sideways at times and then often turned the quilt to have the design facing me lengthwise as I approached the end. The space around the machine makes this very easy. Not so easy was to follow a line...I am totally out of practice and had to go really slow. So there are some minor variations in the design but that will not be noticeable at all.

Not exactly a fast process. For this quilt I have to trace and quilt the design in 3 sections. This is ok for this baby quilt but I doubt I would do this on a Queensize quilt...that would take ages. At the moment I am tracing one evening and then the next evening I quilt the design across, taking the paper out after each section.

Very happy how this is turning out. This is a welcome relief from the allover designs I usually do (meander, swirling, loops etc). Not sure I will do this all the time but once in a while this could be quite interesting. The only thing to remember is to keep the design a bit simple and somewhat free flowing, otherwise you will sit there ripping out the paper for ages. In my little design the paper comes away fairly easy, the time consuming factor is more the tracing of the design. Looking at it though...well worth it, really suits this little quilt.

Linking up to Esther's blog for her WOW=WIPs on Wednesdays

Karin