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!!!
2 thoughts on “Ruler Machine Quilting – Day 3”
ooh, I like that fourth photo, kinda randomly placed but joined shapes.
This is quite fascinating. Lovely to see what these rulers really can do. Or more to the point, what their users can do.