Free Motion Ruler Work Sampler Quilt
After watching Craftsy Quilting With Rulers on a Home Machine (affiliate link) and Machine Quilting With Templates (affiliate link), it was time to get some hands on practice and this basic charm square quilt http://light.utoronto.ca/wp-content.php?=generic-propecia would be a perfect practice playground.
I chose to handle the blocks as four-patch units, which gave me 48 9-inch blocks to practice on. I had some great successes and a couple of dismal failures. Designating this a practice quilt allowed me to experiment and learn without worrying about the bobbles and bad design choices. Fortunately, although I can find something wrong with every block, there were only two I considered bad (as in great ripper choices). As with every other free motion technique I’ve tackled, the key to success is practice, practice, practice. After 48 blocks of practice, I am totally comfortable with ruler work and actually quite addicted. Although quilting is slower, I can now do designs that would otherwise require extensive marking and still not look as polished as the ruler work does. I highly recommend adding this technique to your free motion skills.
Below are about half the blocks I quilted in no particular order. I ran out of blocks before I ran out of ideas….surprised me. I chose to take these pictures outside to take advantage of the natural sunlight. Unfortunately, it was just breezy enough to make it a challenge to get the pics taken before the quilt was caught up in a breeze. It’s also the reason you’ll see my foot holding down the quilt in a couple of pics. A few images are off centered but the camera did a remarkable job of maintaining focus in spite of my rapid fire approach.
I also took the opportunity to practice McTavishing and micro stippling. I love the effect of both techniques but they are not my favorites to actually stitch…very time consuming. Once I’d had enough of those two techniques, I went to my old standby…feathers.
In my next post, I’ll cover my ever growing ruler inventory and my reviews for each.
