Deciding On A Quilting Design

The Fancy Foot block is cute, but left me scratching my head for a suitable quilting design. I had decided to do ruler work instead of an allover design. I have a whole bag full of rulers by now and the best way to become really familiar with them is by using them on a quilt. I find that it does take a bit of practice to work out how to align them, the best way to hold them and which one you might prefer for which job. But first, I had to come up with something...

This took a lot of doodling on the Ipad...tried all sort of things and in the end decided to go for some straight lines to stitch down the elongated triangles in order to emphasize the circular nature of the 'foot', then do some simple curves in the square sections and some pebbles in the middle to make the middle section recede. Worked out a stitching path diagram which took the longest time...somehow I find that incredibly difficult to visualize, so out came the Ipad again.

Realised today that this may need to be revised as I did not stitch one seam down...not sure whether I like this or not as the 'foot' is puffing out a bit.

Happy with the arrangement though.

I used the following rulers for this first part:
- Pro Echo3 &5 (all time favourite shown above)
- Ditch ruler (shown above)
You would have seen the circles in the sashing. Thought I give that a try...used the long Skinny ruler to quilt a 1/4in echo and then used the 1/4in Swiss Cheese ruler. My sashing is 1 1/2in wide, so I used the 3/8in Echo foot to make the circle exactly 1in.

Was a bit impressed with that...have only really played around with the Swiss Cheese ruler on practice samples but was encouraged by the first lot that I did. Accuracy was a must as the circle fits exactly in that space with not a millimeter to spare. At this stage I also realised that I needed to do the sashing first before the dense quilting would compact the areas...so continued on that today...

Well, alignment  was an issue...I had drawn myself a center line in my sashing but somehow that did not work so well, possibly because I was drawing on the sandwiched piece, so my line was not necessarily exactly in the middle. Also, of course, my quilt is not sitting tightly on a frame but is scrunched up all over the place which does affect the alignment of things. After a while I started to eyeball this a bit, however the eye is trained for 1/4in, not 3/8in. To my surprise, at least in one of the long sashings I found that if I aligned the side markings of the circle exactly at the top of the sashing, I hit both echo lines spot on. I spent a lot of time looking at this as this made absolutely no sense, however it worked! I suspected that I was shifting the ruler ever so slightly as I was doing the circle because I was holding on too tight trying to concentrate on staying on the circle. Anyway, this is how far I got today...

Looks really nice, I think. Planning to do swirls around the applique but will have to finish all the sashing first.

Really enjoying this and getting a very good workout on all the different rulers.

Karin

Handiquilter Ruler of the Month Club - the Swiss Cheese Ruler

Another month has gone by...

This month we were introduced to the Swiss Cheese Ruler

The ruler has three different sizes of circles, i.e. 1/4in, 3/4in and 1 1/4in.

This was a bit of fun playing around with this.

First tried just fitting the circles within lines...not that easy if you have trouble being exact in putting your lines down, but again, I think this is only practice. The circles are easy to do. If you look at the ruler you will notice the opening...in the Westalee rulers they insert a little piece to close that gap. With the HQ rulers that gap can be distracting as the foot sinks slightly into it and creates a bit of a notch. However, if you slow down a bit at that point and concentrate this is not much of an issue and even if you get a bit of a notch it is hardly noticeable.

I did try the 1/4in circles which are tiny, tiny...while they do create beautiful little pearls on a practice piece, I had problems fitting them nicely into my lined up 1/4in space. Personally  I think it is easier to do them freehand. The other two sizes are great though as you will not be able to keep it nice and straight if you were to do them freehand.

The square next to it has the orange peel design done with the 3/4in circle. For that I drew a grid in the square first and put my circles neatly into each square and then completed the overlapping circles. That worked really well and is a good way of doing this design at that size.

Next I did just lines with alternate circles, again at the 3/4in size. 

Really like this design...I used the straight edge of the Slice Ruler to give me a straight line and then just switched to the circles in between. I think I did draw a loose grid in the background first to keep my orientation straight.

And another one

Filled in some of the 1 1/4in circles as this is what they showed on the Handiquilter website. Thought initially that this was quite boring but actually looks really interesting. If you have them all lined up in a border and fill every alternative one, this could look quite good.

Overall really like this ruler as the circles are small enough to be used in blocks, sashings and borders in a variety of ways. While small I know from experience that no matter how careful you are to follow a drawn line, you will not achieve a tidy round circle freehand even at the 3/4in size. The 1/4in circle however is just a tad too small for me and unless I figure out how to align it precisely I probably prefer to do those little pebbles freehand.

Karin