I’m QUILTING AGAIN!!!

Hooray!!!

After 5 months of income tax season and 3+ weeks in Africa, I am back home and getting to spend time in my studio. It is SUCH a wonderful feeling!!

The first order of business is to quilt the first of two baby quilts that I need to get into the mail. I made the tops at our guild retreat back in May (you can read about it HERE)

I knew that I wanted to keep the quilting fairly simple and I also wanted it to be FAST. But, I was concerned about how to fill in ALL of that space and keep it interesting!!

Somewhere along the line, I got the idea to use some of my Westalee “Spin-E-Fex” rulers to quilt some large-ish designs first and then fill in with other quilting.

So, the first step was to decide on placement of those designs and get them quilted!!

I chose to add a few half-designs to some of the edges as well……

I used several different rulers in the Westalee Spin-E-Fex series, including #11, 15 & 16.

I have previously posted reviews, videos and information on each of these rulers and you can check them out here…..

Spin-E-Fex #11

Spin-E-Fex #15

Spin-E-Fex #16

Now that the ruler work is done, it is time to move on to the filler quilting!! Come back tomorrow for more…..

Spinning again….

I am continuing to work with the Westalee Spin-E-Fex rulers and today am showing #16…..

It is another ruler that is super easy to use and provides a lot of versatility as to the pattern that you end up with!!

This is only ONE of the designs that you do…..

Today I am working on “Julio” to demonstrate the ease of this sweet ruler…..

Hope you enjoy using this one as much as I am!!!

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…..