Learn Basics of Rulerwork on Domestic Sewing Machines

hi i'm loretta hayes at hayes sewing machine company and welcome to our fifth creative sewing video series um so today our topic is the basics of machine quilting ruler work we've had lots and lots of you been bringing your quilt tops in that you've been working out of your stash of from the pandemic so we've been getting to see a lot of your quilt tops but we want to see a lot of your quilts and this quilt this demo is literally designed for getting those quilt tops done so one of the things that i love about ruler work is what used to be a long arm only technique is now something that we can do on any domestic machine and it's not a one in you know that you have to do entirely ruler work what is fun about it is you can quilt an entire quilt with ruler work but you can also simply use it to fill in spaces so on this particular quilt i did a lot of uh curved work piecing quilting work but then i had this really large white space that i wanted to do something interesting in it rather than just say a fill with stippling or whatnot and so this crea this design was created by using a circle template and running it for excuse me eight times once i had this done then these little squares on points look like oh they needed something to be done in them so i took and did a little circle and oni did four and of course once those were done the little triangles on the edges felt like they needed something so we just stuck a little circle in there so you can use your ruler work to just fill in in negative space but you can also use it to completely quilt the project so on this table runner we have circles on basically uh the dark side of the table runner and then we have straight line work on the other side and both of these were done with rulers that this side was not done with the walking foot it was done just with rulers and over here on this table runner all of this terrific fill for the background was also created with the ruler work and then our little loops were also cons were done with ruler work so nothing on this table runner was done with a walking foot it was entirely done with a ruler and so on the back side you can really see what was done with the ruler so let's get into the basics of doing ruler work the first thing that you need if you are doing ruler work is you need rulers that are specifically designed for doing this so the very first time i heard of ruler work i was so excited that i ran up to my machine i got a free motion foot and a rotary ruler out and i'm like i'm ready to go i'm going to go ahead and do this and about oh 30 seconds in needle hits ruler crack the ruler in half shattered the needle luckily the machine was fine uh and then i realized that i needed to know a little bit more about ruler work before i got started so what you need to know is the first thing is you need to have a free motion foot for your machine that is specifically designed for ruler work so to give you an idea there are basically three types of ruler work feet but they are all the same in one particular area so you can see on the foot here that this is much higher than a standard free motion foot and because of that when we place a ruler up against it the ruler will only go to the edge of the foot it will not hop and go up over where the needle can go so the three most common uh types of ruler feet that we sell are the bernina ruler foot which is foot number 72 the the ruler foot uh what's fun about this foot is it now is available in a vintage number 72 so for those of you who have older bernina's where you are always having to kind of adapt a generic foot you can now get a vintage 72 for your like old 12 30 a 15 30 16 30 that kind of thing if you have questions about which 72 foot you can simply call the store now those are for bernina's and they're only for bernina's these two feet are what we refer to this one is a low bar ruler foot and will fit on any machine that accepts low bar feet so basically that means that the screw that you tighten up your presser foot with is going to be about a half an inch from the base of your sewing machine the next one is a high bar ruler foot and you can see the shank is much larger so when you tighten up the screw on the base of you to attach your foot you'll notice that your foot if you have a high bar foot the screw is about an inch above but once again all of them have one thing in common and that is that it is circular and that it has that taller foot at the base so that your ruler will not hop up on top of the presser foot all right so let's go ahead and put one of these feet on so i'm working on a bernina this morning so i'm going to clamp that foot on and when i get that foot on i am going to slide my demonstrating sample underneath a bit bernina feet take a quarter inch ruler so this is the size ruler that long armors use so you can use this on your domestic machine which is really awesome because it gives you a lot of choice so if you're doing a presser foot that whether you're doing a long arm itself or you're doing a domestic machine like a bernina you want a quarter inch ruler so you notice much thicker than a rotary ruler so that once again this this is going to line up against the foot and not get under or over the foot they also make low bar rulers so if your machine takes that low bar foot you'll notice that the low bar ruler is a little bit thinner it's actually thicker than your rotary ruler but definitely thinner than our our long arm ruler and the third type is for the high bar and so i always think the high bar is kind of interesting because it falls right in between the low bar and the long arm ruler so you need to know what type of foot you have what that you're going to put on your machine because it you're going to pick the size the thickness of your ruler dependent on your foot so i'm going to be working with quarter inch rulers today and we're going to get started with our ruler so the first thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and put my presser foot down so what we are trying to do with our uh ruler foot is we would like to have the ruler foot down close enough to the fabric that it's not you know there's not a lot of space between the foot and the fabric i should be able to move my foot but i should not be able to slide my ruler underneath so one of the things that i do just like all free motion you're going to pull your bobbin thread up so we're going to go ahead and we're going to pull that any other day of the week ladies i would just go ahead and do it but this morning it wrapped around the needle there we go all right so we're going to pull our bobbin thread up and this is typical of what you do for all free motion you never want to have that bobbin thread floating underneath your quilt because murphy's law says it's going to get hooked up and you're going to have some interesting seam rippering to do so what i do is i pull that up i'm going to then take it wrap it around my fingers and i'm going to do a couple of stitches just a little hitch just to kind of anchor it in now if you are doing a quilt that is for the kids to wrap up in front of the tv that kind of thing basically not a quilt that's going to be put into a show then i would just anchor it and go ahead and clip those threads off and get those threads off out of the way if you're doing a show quilt in other words it's going to be judged then you want to take it and leave those tails long so that you can hand put them on a hand needle and put them through in the batting layer later on now here is the joy of doing ruler work i've got my presser foot down i've tested it to make certain that i've got my presser in my ruler so it won't go underneath the foot and i'm now going to start stitching so what i'd like you to think about is what is involved if you are doing a square on say like a log cabin maybe you did a log cabin quilt you have 30 blocks and you got that little square in the center and you think oh i'd like to highlight that square if you're doing it with your feed dogs up and a walking foot you would sew down about an inch and a half you would sink your needle you would then take your quilt pivot the quilt you'd sew down about an inch and a half you'd sink your needle you'd pivot the quilt and then you do it a fourth time to complete the square which is fine if you're doing it on this little sample but we're doing it on a whole quilt so we're having to shove the quilt all the way through the free arm of the machine that is why ruler works is is wonderful if i wanted to accent that little square all i'm going to do is i'm going to take my ruler and i'm going to lay it up next to the seam and i'm going to sew down now mind you ladies i am moving the fabric myself so i'm moving the material it's there's no feed dogs involved here so if your feed dogs are down then the question is how do you get the fabric to move so easily and the best thing to help you with that is a product called handy grip it is uh done for long arm rulers it's done by the handy quilter company and it's designed so that you can cut sections of it and you can apply it to the back side of your ruler it's kind of a clear sandpaper but it never rubs off you know sandpaper eventually would rub off this never rubs off and because of it it grips the material so if i put my ruler onto the fabric here and i try and push the fabric i can push it a little bit but you see how the ruler slides on top if you put the grip on you can then take it and you can move with one finger you can move that whole quilt so the grip on the ruler is going to help you maneuver the fabric then you're going to come around so i've got done imagining our square again i'm going to come down to the corner and now instead of turning my quilt i'm simply going to take my ruler and i'm going to move my ruler to the front of the foot so we can take off and we would sew the length of our square now we would need to go back so normally we would be pivoting the quilt but with ruler work we're just going to pivot the ruler we're going to come in and we're going to go backwards following the edge of that seam and then my last one i would come along and i would stitch in and i would come to the the corner so you can see how something as simple as a straight ruler would allow you to go in and do details on your quilt that would otherwise really be a lot of labor and you know a lot of work one of the other things that i love about straight line work is you can do you know it's not just straight line you could do triangles hexagons whatever so you could come in and you could work on your ruler like this so if i come in and maybe i'm doing a border i could come in and i could sew up from one if you can imagine this is the edge of my border i could sew from one edge of my border to the next edge of my border and then i could go ahead and i could move my ruler and i could come in and i would go to the next one and so once again you get rid of that rock and roll with your quilt you're simply pivoting your ruler to make the shape that you would like now one of the cool things about all ruler feet is they're all circular so you can see the ruler can go all the way around the edge of the foot they also have been set up so that the needle is exactly one quarter of an inch from the outside of the presser foot so if i would like to come back let's say i did my my mark here but maybe i wanted to fill in a little bit on this sir on this uh triangle one of the easiest things for me to do is to do a quarter inch echo because the foot is exactly a quarter of an inch from the needle so if i simply sew forward until the back side of the foot is running right along the edge of this stitching i can then bring my ruler in and line my ruler right up along the edge of my stitch i'm going to sew down until my presser foot touches just kisses that line i then am going to roll my ruler over line it up on the stitching and i can move along if i wanted to do it again i could run along i'm just going to sew a little bit until the edge of my foot comes up against my line and i think we need one more stitch to do that there you go and you can kind of trial and error as you're going so then i can line up my ruler along that line i'm coming along until the back of my foot you may be able to see it in the camera that way the back of my foot is lining up on this line here so now i can come in and turn my ruler and just that easily we have done echoing on the quilting so super super simple i also find that a half inch spacing is very easy for quilters to do because i find most quilters at about 30 feet can see a perfect quarter inch you know we look at our seams and we go oh that's off a ted or you know i'm a little bit too big or a little bit too small so one of the things that i can do is if i'm stitching along if i'm doing a half an inch i know that i've got a quarter of an inch from the needle to the edge of the foot but i can eyeball from the stitching line to the outside edge of the foot i can eyeball that quarter inch so one quarter inch to the edge of the foot and another quarter inch to the needle gives me a half an inch it's also fabulous the ruler companies have put all of these great lines on here so these lines are set up in quarter inch increments so if i want to line up on a half inch okay i'm going to be lining up on the first line which is slightly counter and counter intuitive because you look at it and go if you're looking at it for cutting purposes you say oh that's a quarter of an inch but remember we're always sewing a quarter of an inch to the needle so we have a quarter of an inch to the edge of the ruler and a quarter of an inch to the needle of the in the middle of the foot so boom here we go we line that up i'm lining up my first line on the ruler i can sew along i'll eyeball it so that i'm stopping about a quarter of an inch from there i can flip my ruler if i'm not perfect i can do one more stitch now i'm perfect and so you can come in and you can do your spacing and then with a ruler you could do three-quarter or an inch or whatever you would like one of the things that i i think that you want to be aware of when you are doing ruler work on a domestic machine is that if you have the availability to use quarter inch rulers which are long arm rollers you need to be aware of long armors uh have a much bigger space to work with so you want to pick out your ruler so that the ruler is smaller rather than longer just to kind of give you an idea uh we're going to show you a wave ruler here okay so this is a long arm ruler which i could use it would it would work if i ran it this way but you see if i run it this way i'm going to hit the inside of my machine on there so a better choice if you're doing this on a domestic machine would be to select a ruler that is a little bit shorter so the mind says oh i want the longest ruler possible because then i don't have to shift it as often but in practical terms a shorter ruler is always better for a domestic machine now it's not to say that we can't do a long line so if we come in and we're doing a long line we can go ahead and we can sew and i usually try not to get right to the edge of my ruler if i was going to continue down this line i would simply stop an inch or so before and then i'd slide my ruler down and i would work my way along and for those of you who are always uh you know really critical about your stitching in the ditch you know you think oh i got up on the high side of my ditch when i was using my walking foot you might want to try ruler work because you don't ever get that little hitch where you've shifted your quilt because you're leading up against a hard edge it keeps you straight all the time so number one ruler for you to get if you're going to try uh free motion ruler work is a straight ruler it sounds boring but it's the ruler that you're going to use the most the second most popular ruler is a circle because no matter how much i practice i am never going to get perfect geometric circles in free motion however with a quilting ruler i can get perfect geometric circles almost instantly you might have to practice one one circle and then you're ready to go now what's interesting is you'll find circles are done differently for different companies so handy quilter does a couple of rulers like this this one is called swiss cheese and there's another swiss cheese ruler that's called a big swiss cheese that has just larger circles on it it's a little it's maybe about two inches bigger on each side so these rulers uh you have multiple circles on one ruler they also have a nice little slit on it and i'll show you what that slid is going to be used for other companies do their circles where they do individual rulers so when you look at the back of the the package where you've got your circles you'll have four shapes you've got four sizes of circles here but you have four individual rulers they also have an opening on the side it's got like a little puzzle piece that you can add and and and put back in take it out and put back in all right so you've picked your ruler you've got your circle ruler how do we use it so if we're doing a circle where we are going to be continuing the quilting line that i've just done one of the cool things is these openings so i'm going to pick up my presser foot okay my needle still attached in do you see why the openings are so awesome ladies it's awesome you can pop those in without breaking your thread now when you go to put your foot down make sure you're kind of in the middle of the circle so that you're not going to sit the foot down right on the the circle then we can come in and we can line up and i typically line up against the opening so that i don't get a little bump in my circle and so i can then go and i can simply sew around the circle i'm doing a little bit of pressure to the edge of my ruler and you get perfect circles with no practice which is awesome now think about circles you could do a bunch of circles like we did for the table runner so this one i think i'll be easier for you to see on that side this one i did larger circles medium-sized circles and baby circles and i simply randomly went from one to the next but you know if you know me that i did not sew a circle tack off clip my thread jump to the next spot sew a circle tack off clip my thread because it's not my way of quilting i like to quilting is fun if it's not fun i i'm going to find something else to do so how do you get the circles to connect so what's really cool about the circles is because you have this hard shape around it you can trace over the circle so if i would like to have a circle directly in front of the circle that i have right now without moving my ruler i can simply sew back over the edge of the circle okay i'm now back to the beginning back to the edge that i want and now i can go ahead and sew another circle so i can come along so it's 360 around and then i can come around another 180 so we can come in my machine is saying that it wants thread so we'll see if it will forgive me so around we go and it's not going to forgive me ladies so just a second i will welcome back we've got the bobbin changed and i just wanted you to see what is happening with your circles so we went 360 around and 180 back 360 around 180 back 360 around and you could continue down and do a straight line so think of this ladies if you're doing a small border or if you're doing sashing it's an awesome way of doing really interesting quilting in that area as opposed to say like just stitching in the ditch along the edges of those sashings now i wanted to show you one other thing when it came to the circles if you remember from the beginning of the video that the big white area on those hexagons how that was done is by drawing eight lines and so once you've got your eight lines done and we did it in ballpoint pen so that you guys could see it on the video but please no ballpoint pen on your project all right do it with something that you can remove so we're going to just come in and we're going to anchor on so pulling our thread again and we're going to pick up our foot and trim that thread out and then we're going to pick a size circle and put the foot down so to create this effect what we're going to do is we're going to line up on the notch and there are lines all the way around the rulers so i'm going to line up basically at six o'clock and 12 o'clock on my circle i'm then going to go ahead and i'm going to stitch around the first circle so i'm coming around i'm going to stop in the center and not pivot my quilt but just pivot my ruler so now my six o'clock is here and my 12 o'clock is there and so we'll stitch around and come back to the beginning then we'll pivot around again so there's my six o'clock in my 12 o'clock then we'll pivot around again so we're just working around we're going to actually do this eight times and it does not matter which way you go around the circle i find my brain goes one way for a little while and then it changes and goes the other way it's fine so long as you sew a whole circle and so we'll come along and go into here and we have two more circles and our design is done so this is super fast to do and what i love about this technique is that when you do this technique you get this fabulous looking design and it's super fast you get these kind of secondary designs you can see in the white how it creates kind of a daisy type shape when you're working in the center so hopefully this gives you an idea of some of the things that you can do with ruler work um we uh next week uh pam remind me again what you're doing um i'm making a three yard quick sorry pam is doing a three yard quilt for our next uh video next week so we will see you next week thank you so much

Channel: HayesSewingMachineCo

Views: 2,567

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: LIiCBFec6Ww

Length: 29min 31sec (1771 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021