Ruler Machine Quilting – Day 3

Since I had such good luck working with the straight rulers, today I decided to try out one of the other rulers that I already own. This time it is a Westalee ruler in a flower petal design…..

The first thing that I tried was an all-over fill design that I saw Angela Walters demonstrate. You start by quilting around the design once……

And then, without moving the ruler, you backtrack around a little ways…..

Next you turn the ruler at an angle and repeat the process. After a few minutes, I had an entire section filled with these designs……

Looking at this I realize that I need to add more variety in the angles so that it doesn’t look as much like one long strip.

Speaking of long strips, I tried doing a border design and ended up with this…..

By keeping the ruler completely still, it is so easy to backtrack…..you can see that I messed up once!!

Next I wanted to try making a “leaf wreath”. When I was watching another video about using one of these rulers, she talked about the hole for the tack…..there’s a hole for a tack???? Oh that is why the ruler set came with 2 tacks!!!

Well look at that!!! By centering this hole over the tack it means that the ruler freely turns in a 360 degree circle!!!

Now for the hilarious part…… in November of last year I was practicing ruler quilting using a charity quilt and I talked about using a tack when working with a circle ruler and showed this photo…..

Notice that the tack is facing down which really worried me because I was afraid that I would scratch my machine. Today I learned that the tack is supposed to be inserted at the back with only the point on the quilt surface!!!! Well that makes a LOT more sense!!!

I started playing with the design with this being my first attempt…..

Not too bad for a first try….just a few sections that I needed to work on.

On about the 4th or 5th attempt, I made a video of the process…..

This has been another fun experiment and I am looking forward to using these new-found skills in a future quilting project!!!