Tag Archives: OCODNP

HONE Continues While Mr. Darcy Pitches a Fit

This week, I decided to tackle a technique that’s been vexing me and evading my understanding for months: ruler work! When I was at the Houston show, hanging out in the Handi Quilter booth, I started playing with the new rulers they had come out with.  And you know what I discovered?  I absolutely suck at ruler work!  And you know what else?  I bought some anyway! I think actually I may have an obsession with rulers, because I keep buying them, and they just collect in a drawer.  I should point out – long arm rulers are different from quilting rulers; rulers for the long arm are 1/4″ thick at least, so that the hopping foot doesn’t “hop” on the ruler and break something important.  I know some quilters who have run over their 1/4″ rulers anyway (myself included) but it doesn’t happen often. Sure is scary because the needle does NOT break! Besides the special rulers, you also need an extended base for your machine to help support the ruler.  I don’t have a picture of mine but you can look at it on the Handi Quilter website: You need rulers to do stitch in the ditch (SID), and also whenever you need to do circles or arcs or anything where precision is necessary.  Well, if I had the computer module on my machine, I wouldn’t need rulers at all because I could just make the machine do it, but I like the challenge of learning this skill on my own.  That’s what HONE is about. If you are sending your quilts out to a long arm quilter, you can expect to pay a premium for ruler work.  It is definitely a skill to be developed, and requires additional tools to support it.  In addition, ruler work is SLOW work.  You can’t go zipping across the quilt when you’re using rulers; you have to slow down, focus on about 4-6″ ahead of the needle at a time, and there are a lot of stops, starts, and adjustments.  If you just have a few block outlines it probably won’t add too much to the cost, but if your quilt is nothing but crosshatching and SID, that’s going to cost more than an edge to edge design. At the end of December, I had finished piecing 4 quilts made from a Moda layer cake, and since I have 4 nearly-identical quilts, I thought it would be fitting to use one of them to practice with. The rulers I employed included a serpentine ruler, 2 sizes of circles (4″ and 8″) and the Handi Versa Tool for stitch in the ditch. The first thing I did was use the serpentine ruler to create a spine for some swirls I planned around the outer border.  Then I used the circles in some of the blocks, and finally I did stitch in the ditch work.  On the back of the circle templates, I sprayed them with 404 Repositionable Adhesive to make sure they didn’t move, but I didn’t do the same for the other two rulers.    Part of the reason for that is that for circles to be perfect, they can’t be shifting around, but for serpentine & SID, you sometimes need to adjust the ruler a bit to follow the seam or fit to an area. The key to ruler work is all about the right pressure: the pressure of your hand holding the ruler, and the pressure of your other hand guiding the machine.  It takes a lot of coordination!  If you press down on the ruler too hard – the machine can’t move, but if you don’t press down hard enough, the ruler will shift.  Likewise, if you push or pull the machine too hard against the ruler, you’ll move the ruler, but if you don’t push or pull hard enough, the machine won’t follow the ruler and you’ll get some crazy looking lines.  It’s a fine balance because you don’t want hand cramps either. I actually trained myself to use the right amount of pressure by buying a ruler with handles. With this ruler, I was focused so much on gripping the handles between my fingers, that I didn’t press down too much and was able to balance the pressure.  When I switched over to the rulers without handles, I got the hang of it pretty quickly.  It’s funny to think on it now, that I was so scared to use rulers before and now I can’t wait to do another quilt that needs ruler work! Since this quilt is a disappearing nine patch with 9.5″ center blocks, I took it as an opportunity to practice different stitches in each area.  I also had a thought that instead of doing the small block samplers from Leah’s 365 Days of Free Motion, I could practice some of her designs on Mr. Darcy.  I started out with this circle: On the inside edge, I used Swirling Petals, and added some swirls on the inside and outside.  I don’t like the inside swirls as much – I could have planned them better, but I did like the petals. Here is the next circle I did: I know the inside is hard to see, but it’s a variation of Bubble Path Spiral.  I say “variation” because my path isn’t a spiral, it meanders around quite a bit.  That was really fun to do.  On the outside of the circle I freehanded some feathers.  Those still need a lot of practice! They are more challenging than you might think. The next circle: This is Skeleton Flower on the inside, and on the outside I just freehanded some lightning bolts. The last circle: This is Wormholes on the inside, and then the Pebbles that I love so much to fill in the outside of the block.  Wormholes is a really fun quilting stitch to do too – I love the randomness of it. In the smaller circles, I used the same design, just wavy lines coming off the center and back again, it reminded me a bit of a sand dollar when I started, but I decided to fill it in a lot more.  As I stitched it, I was thinking about the hands of a clock, and I chanted as I stitched it: 12 o’clock, 6 o’clock, 3 o’clock, 9 o’clock… I filled the inside of the circle first, then on the outside, I made more little spikes, but when I came to another part of the block, I just took off in long wavy lines.  You’ll see that better in other pictures. The final design in the border was just an all over swirl in the vine.  I decided to add more texture to the swirls by adding 3 spiky points to them as I exited the spiral.  I don’t know if Leah has a design like this or not, I didn’t consult her designs for this one. Now, just as I was coming to the last half of the quilt, Mr. Darcy pitched a fit.  You see, he has several modes of sewing for stitch regulation, and the one that is critical for free motion is the one he just wouldn’t stitch in consistently.  I spent a half hour on the phone with his parents (Handi Quilter) and the verdict was that we needed to replace his brain.  Mr. Darcy isn’t fully computerized, but he does have quite a few computerized bits anyway, and there just seems to be a bug in his.  I was able to coax him into cooperating to finish the quilt, but it’s quite maddening to want to stitch something a certain way, and have him refuse to do so.  You will obey me, Darcy!!  Please? The last part of the stitching I want to point out is the SID.  You can’t really see it from the front (that’s the point) but on the back, it really sets off the blocks nicely: I am very pleased at how straight my lines are on this quilt, and I love how the blocks are set off.  The one thing I would probably change is to not have stitched the lines on the inside of the smaller circle.  It’s important to think about the quilting and how it will look both with and without block lines! Now here is the whole quilt from the front: And here it is from the back: Isn’t that just super fun?!?! To endless possibilities, Ebony

Read more