Longarm Quilting: Ruler Work for Beginners Online Class (Part 1)

hey everybody it's Michael I have finally gotten back to doing this video everyone this is a condensed video which is based on my long arm ruler work class long arm really work for beginners and we're just going to go through it quickly here and there is a panel if you want to buy the panel it's available at spoon flower I have linked it below it's great for practice work but you can also just use your own fabric and mark some lines out or some dots you'll see as we get into it since I can't get out on teach right now like so many of us I wanted to do this on video so first of all ruler work long arm why why you interested well for most people they've tried out their long arm and they've done some free motion quilting maybe you've worked on some pantographs and followed lines with your laser pointer or if you have an anova some of you might have panto vision and you following digitally through the screen but why would we want to do ruler work well ruler work makes stitch in the ditch much easier and most of us who are doing custom work on our quilts want to stitch in the ditch to stitch around shapes rulers helpful a great deal with that and you know it opens up a world of design possibilities especially if you're interested in doing like a whole cloth quilt medallion style or just anything really so i'm got some pictures here Judy Madsen is probably one of my favorite ruler work artist she's great at creating intricate designs with rulers but she does mostly straight edge and then incorporates fills which is what I love to do but we're also going to talk about some curved rulers and some specialty rulers as you know I've designed a bunch of rulers and my other videos show you how to use those or some of them anyway but this is for someone who just really is wanting to start out and hasn't done ruler work before I filmed the series I don't know maybe a year and a half or two years ago and then reposted again when I switched channels and that shows you some cross hatching and some things like that but I'm actually gonna step through a lot of those basics again so if you've already seen that feel free to you know fast-forward me some if you'd like first thing for ruler work let's talk about what you're gonna need besides all the normal stuff that you need for all everyday quilting okay so I have my ruler work foot on hopefully you can see that it's a higher shank than normal so here's what this is the foot that came with my machine and you might have a separate one on open-toe version okay so I've got the ruler work foot on here let's look at a ruler when this is when the quilts here this ruler the foot has enough Heights to it that this ruler is not going to go above this if you saw this on here you have a high chance of this ruler jumping over and then your needle hitting it so we don't want that okay so you've got your ruler foot on right okay good and hopefully that's easy for you whichever kind of long arm you have to install that next you need a ruler base okay so this is the ruler base I got when I first bought my machine it's quite large and this creates the surface so that you can have your ruler on top of your quilt your quilt here and you've got some stability with this surface to be able to put some pressure on a little bit of pressure okay so it installs you've got your needle up you're hopping foots in its normal position and this for the Innova this just slides under the hopping foot then you lift it once you've gotten it into position and then it snaps down there so there you go so if you have your ruler on your quilt you can see this provides a nice table for it plenty of room to get around however what you'll find is that this base right here bang goes right up into this bar so you have one two three four five inches of quilting space not usable because of the base okay which is okay I mean depending on your space you still got some however so um anova came up with a smaller one and I don't know the dimensions on other brands but this this is the smaller base and it's the one that I use all the time because well for two reasons I want more quilting space plus you will find when you use rulers that and watch it it snaps down just the same there we go you'll find that you are concentrating most of the pressure on your rulers really close to where the hopping foot is in the needle and that you don't necessarily need this extra space back here so now when I bring this up to the bar that's three inches so I've gained it two more inches of quilting space which is important to me because I don't like to advance the quilt just lazy no it just takes time okay so I've got the ruler base on ruler foot and I need a ruler if you take my class you're getting this one as part of the class and I've chipped it a little bit yours would look flawless beautiful this is called ruler work 101 it has a straight edge it has inch increments it has some quarter inch lines some dash lines it has a curved edge and it has quarter inch echo lines for that curve so this isn't all-around good one to start with plus it has needle stop and some people like needle stop and if you saw my other video about all the rulers I have that's where you can make sure that this is lined up with the exact line that you're going on and it will stop the hopping from going any further okay anyway this is the ruler so we're ready to go so I'm going to move this over to the panel now okay so the first thing that we would be doing after we talk about why you want to use rulers in your quilting is to do some drawing I would have handed out some drawing discs which you may have seen in the Baptist fans videos when I drew them out and you would have brought a pencil and you would have put your pencil into the drawing disc and you would have gotten your ruler and you would have drawn around your ruler to mimic the idea of the hopping foot and that would give you an idea of what a quarter inch looks like away from the ruler because your needle is 1/4 inch away from the edge of the hopping foot in most circumstances I don't know if there is a particular long arm out there or a sit-down machine where the needle is not exactly a quarter inch there may be some okay but the idea is that's approximately a quarter inch away so when I have a ruler next to my hopping foot the stitching line is one quarter inch away from that and that's probably one of the main things that you'll get used to as you start working with rulers is sometimes you may forget and you may as if you are going to just use a regular pencil and a ruler and paper or whatever you might think oh I need to land right here on the corner and put your ruler right here on the corner well that's wrong when we're quilting only because we have to compensate for another quarter inch so that's the first thing that we get used to is can we follow straight lines with our rulers and trust me it's not that easy following lines is never that easy creating lines is not hard and if I created a dot here and a dot here and said create a straight line between the two you'd probably be fine but if I said so on this line it's not as easy as it sounds but that's what I make you do okay so I have dropped my needle down into the top-left corner now I do want to talk about order of quilting and direction of quilting because you're going to find as you get more used to rulers that you may prefer to work top to bottom or bottom to top and there are some reasons why you may want to work bottom to top if you're using lines on your rulers I will explain that to you in a little bit let's not get too far ahead of ourselves here that's me sorry so here's a ruler don't be scared what you want to do is start coordinating how to hold the ruler how to move the machine and how to produce beautiful stitches okay I know it's a lot right okay so you're going to have to try to find a balance of pressure and when I say pressure you never want to like be really hard pressure here you want a light touch but manageable and this is just something you will have to practice with rulers I like to always have a finger or two off the ruler while summer on it and I might say okay you guys ladies and gentlemen put your fingers here put your other fingers here just give you some suggestions but mmm at first you're gonna want a little bit of stability now I also want you to think about this ruler base under here this ruler base you remember it goes to about here so if I put pressure close to the needle the hopping foot everything's fine but you notice if I use my thumb and I put pressure down here it makes this ruler want to hop up that's trouble so one thing to remember is you don't want to be holding your rulers far far far away from your hopping foot and expect stability like this is dangerous down here you don't want pressure down here I mean later you might be able to get away with it but when you're learning keep the pressure close close to that hopping foot make sure you've got a base to support that pressure okay so several things will be happening and let's say that I'm going to stitch some things that are going to be happening is first of all I want to line up my ruler right up next to that hopping foot I want to butt it up next to it can you see in this camera hopefully you can see where that line stops remember I have needle stop here that means if I put the edge right here close to here I'm gonna get a straight line because it's here now what's one thing I've already taught you you can't stop here you actually have to go 1/4 inch further to be able to stitched at that point but for lining up purposes can you see how I'm keeping the edge of that line on the edge of this line I can do that and get pretty good results so that's why some people like needle stop now this is a good all-around ruler I don't use it that often I probably should this is what I used more more than anything is my straight ruler unless I'm doing curves this is my go-to I told you that in the video where I was showing you all the different rulers but I manufacturer in the other ones that I used to this is a three by 12 and I just use it all the time so it does not have this needle stop on it but you can start I mean if you're sewing if you're much of a quilter you know your quarter-inch and you want to be about a quarter inch away but you're watching as you stitch so you try to stay on that line okay so for some of these exercises I will use this ruler for most I'm going to use this because this is what you would have used in the class and I might pull out some other ones too all right have I done enough talking let's do some stitching and see what we come up with okay so hopefully I'm not in the way I'll find out when I view this during the editing process but here we go so when we put my glasses on okay I'm in regulated mode and I am doing a few different things the ruler is this way the ruler is lightly being pressed with a little teeny bit of force this way okay at the same time I'm pulling this handlebar here I'm pulling it down towards me but I'm also pushing it this way so I want you to think about opposing pressures and that's how you keep contact the hopping foot with the ruler these two things need to be slightly pressure towards each other at all times so so this I've got pressure going to my left ruler pressure going towards my right at the same time I'm pulling down very lightly to be able to travel okay so here we go again I've got pressure towards the left I'm talking about with my right hand pressure towards the right holding the ruler and I'm bringing down this handlebar okay I want to show you something here if you can see this next since these are lined up if I kept the edge of this ruler here that has the needle stop on this line here do you see this next straight line I should be able to hit that point and stop when I get there so that's what I'm gonna do it's sort of cheating but if you had a quilt with blocks on it and if the blocks were in a good alignment you would be doing the same thing okay I stopped on the point now you can see I'm pretty much stayed on the line right but it may it may falter a little bit every once in a while okay so I have successfully gone down and now I would have you travel over and when you're traveling over for this particular block I'm gonna I'm going to keep my ruler 1/4 inch away that's the goal now I can do some things because this panel like I told you has kind of a grid work to it on this ruler I have some vertical lines and some horizontal lines if I line up vertical line here and a horizontal line I can pretty much think that I'm gonna stay true to this line that I'm stitching on however fabric is fabric and fabric does have a little bit of life of its own so it may not always be perfect now I want you to look at some other things too I have the ruler closer to me in between me and the hopping foot that is where I feel the most comfortable it doesn't mean that you cannot use your ruler back here it means that if you are holding the ruler with your left hand because you're a right-handed quilter you would have to bend your hand like this behind okay which sometimes you have to get into weird positions to quilt so this is not unusual but you could do that if you're a left-handed quilter you could be using your right hand back here and guiding the machine with your left okay but this is not my most comfortable way I'm much more comfortable with the ruler between my body and the hopping foot okay so that's the way I'm going to stitch this one now I'm gonna keep the ruler where it is and not look at the lines and I did pretty good sometimes you just need to look at the line as well because you're gonna see where the stitches are and that's what you want is the stitches to be on the line right so sometimes you have to adjust now here we're going up i can quilt from this side or i could quote from this side i'm talking about holding my ruler that's gonna be personal preference and up to you I'm probably more comfortable with it on this side then I am on this side and it depends on what you're lining up and what you what you can see so I'm gonna quilt with it to my left okay so once again I'm putting pressure going to the right pressure on this handlebar going to the left and then moving the Machine up okay let's see how that goes now I'm watching through my hopping foot to see where I'm stitching if I'm on the line and this stretch here I could leave my hand where it is for the whole time but I recommend when you're first starting out to walk your fingers up as you stitch so let's say I'm here and I definitely want the most pressure as close to the hopping foot as possible but you know you want to stitch for a little ways now here maybe I'll walk my fingers up let's do some more walk my fingers up stitch some more you don't have to do it all in one go you can start and stop okay so we've got three sides done and now we're here and again the ruler is closest to me and I'm going to watch where my bobbin thread oops I think I'm out of bobbin thread okay hold on okay so I'm being super cheap and I'm using leftover bobbins okay so once again I'm stitching across the top line here and this is where I'm really just eyeing it the best that I can and I'm gonna watch where those stitches fall and if they get off I'll adjust they're doing pretty good okay now I've gotten back to the start okay so we've done that now I would have you travel and we would go across so now we're just practicing our skills learning about moving the machine left to right let's go down to the next one and then I want to talk to you about direction because you may notice when you're free motion quilting if you've been quilting for a while that your machine likes certain directions in it maybe maybe doesn't like other directions feel if you have a preference of one way or another now I have equal pressure everywhere this ruler is not going anywhere however if you want you can be more specific and move your fingers you can stop you can adjust okay it's really not fair that I've done this for so long and I just know what it feels like but I remember what it was like and how scared I was with rulers and look I've this one has a chip in it this one has a chip in it does that tell you something I think it's Kimmy Bruner who said it's not a matter of if you will chip a ruler hit a ruler it's when you will hit one and just deal with it it's part of life okay all right so now I'm gonna backtrack over the stitching below and now I'm going to the right I will go ahead and talk to you for a minute about quilting top to bottom and bottom to top okay I promise I won't do this much talking once we get to the other blocks but because I have a line here it's fine you're just following the line but let's say that you didn't mark everything and you wanted to use your ruler to create evenly spaced lines throughout all right so let's pretend like that's what you want to do and that these aren't marked and you make your first line so we're gonna stitch on this line but pretend like that lines not there like you made it okay and let's say you want it evenly spaced out to the next line well how are you gonna do that you're gonna travel down here let's say you let's say you travel down as far as you want to go but you're gonna have to hold the ruler back here remember how I said I don't like holding the ruler behind the hopping foot because it makes you stretch and move your wrist in weird ways plus you can't see okay so that's why let's just go down here instead I'm saying if I had started here and I stitched this line and remember we're pretending like these lines aren't already marked well when I move up I have this reference line here on my ruler on my straight edge ruler and if I know it has to be 3/4 of an inch and use that line that's all I need and it's really close to me and I can see it so that means if I were gonna quilt evenly spaced lines on a quilt block like this my preference is to start from the bottom and work my way up because of the very fact that I can use the previous stitch lines and line it up with my ruler and there it is now if you tell me that you are more comfortable using your ruler back here please do that because I'm all about what works for you okay so if you were my student usually the way this works is they're in groups if if we're lucky enough to be in a class where everyone has their own machine that's great you just get to practice it three times otherwise there may be two other people that you're sharing with and then they get to do theirs okay so the first thing we did was lines just nice straight lines I hope you can see that in the camera hopefully with this the closer one the thread is kind of matchi and match you to the back even though it's a it's like a white thread okay so we've done our straight lines you have learned to hold the ruler you've learned about pressure remember about the pressure towards the hopping foot you've learned about pulling and pushing the Machine the way it needs to go and you've learned about walking your fingers we've haven't really touched on lines on the ruler but we haven't really needed that quite yet okay so if you bought the panel or if you're marking your own go ahead and stitch out a couple more if you'd like I'm going to move down to this next one okay I think I can get away without advancing the quilt actually let me advance it just a little teeny bit okay this one it's basically the same thing it's straight lines it just gives you more practice with straight lines okay so this one um first I'm gonna outline it and then I may go through and do some curves I'm just getting used to the machine so that's what I want you to do is just getting used to starting and stopping and changing direction but all with straight lines and I cheated I used my other ruler let's use this ruler instead okay so pressure to the left to the right with my hand and my ruler pressure to the left holding on to the handlebar and gently gliding this down here we go I hope I don't sound like I'm babying you I don't like that and then when people teach I hate that I hate taking a class when I feel like I'm being babied oh I'm just trying to reinforce the ideas and if I say something over and over again it's just because I want you to learn it it doesn't mean I don't think you didn't listen the first time okay so now we're gonna go to the left this might be an awkward and maybe it's easier for you to go to the right so now you're feeling what it's like to go to the left and when I did that I didn't I wasn't lining this up with anything other than I started with it pressed up against the foot over here and I took a look on the other side to see with it I'm about a quarter inch away from the edge and it just worked out great okay now here's where I would normally hold it here can you see how my oh oh it's full anyway maybe from this camera can can you see how I have my leader the way that I've pinned it on is kind of getting in the way here so I might do this instead and if I do this from this side I'm gonna line up my needle stop with the top of this as a good indicator of where I will be staying on a line okay I'm gonna walk my hand my fingers up and when I'm when I'm doing it in an awkward position I tend to use more of my palm than just my fingers that's something that you'll have to feel out okay let's go ahead and do the top line okay I just walked my fingers and there we go okay so now now we can do whatever we like since these were mostly horizontal lines on the block before when we get to this block it's really more about having more vertical lines the stitch so so feeling the machine coming towards you and going away from you we can backtrack a little bit and you can practice more on some of those so sorry I just just whipping right through this I think that I want you to try to get gain speed and confidence also but I didn't really tell you what I was doing I'm coming down and if I want to I'm gonna bring this other ruler in here if I want to I'm showing you this I can use that needle stop and make a guesstimate of where I think a quarter inches away from that line and leave my ruler here even though I walk my fingers a little bit and hopefully it will stop right where I want it to stop let's see there we go that's perfect okay now you may or may not have noticed that I adjusted this ruler a little bit when I quilted down and that was just a natural instinct for me which may not be for you at the beginning but you will get it let's travel over okay and what I mean when I adjust it is is that I was watching the thread and I saw it slightly veering off towards the right and so I adjusted my ruler slightly towards the left to try to get back on track and that's completely normal um if you if you look at some stitch in the ditch stuff oh gosh I mean how often is it perfect the best of us don't follow the lines exactly okay that's that's not what it's about when you're moving the Machine away from you do you have this visual impairment you know the needle bar itself but you'll tend to either look from the left or from the right to be able to see what you're doing I'm looking the way that I'm doing this I'm actually looking right through the hopping foot and watching where my needle is stitching and that's allowing me to adjust my ruler and I will slightly adjust it to stay on the line I don't know if that makes sense or not that's what that's what I'd like you to try to think about though wherever your best visual is so when I'm moving away from me it's not the same visual that I get as I'm coming down towards me so let's travel over and if you quilt on a panel like this or you make your own lines or whatever you will see which way is most comfortable for you and where you're looking I'm always actually I guess I'm always looking in the middle of this hopping foot to see where my stitching is I mean I'm paying attention to my rulers and everything too but I want to see where the stitch lands so continue to do this this is just a big crosshatch and again I am watching do you see how my hand is on my ruler and it's allowing me to do this pivoting motion but don't you think about the most pressure and that's pivoting here on that foot so that if I need to slightly adjust I just do I'm using my thumb and my pinky to kind of angle this the way I need it because if as I'm looking at this it doesn't look completely straight this fabric is pulling a little bit in one direction it looks like there's a little bit of a curve here so I could make my ruler straight but I can tell if I make it straight up here it's not it's it's there's a smaller distance here so this is telling me that I see I need to do some adjusting you'll see when you actually do it and that's because this is fabric if you were just quilting this out on your own without lines to follow you wouldn't be adjusting most likely because it would just kind of work itself out and be it would look perfect because you don't have lines to base where you're stitching from do you know what I mean you're not being judged being on the line your line is going to fool the eye and appear to be where it's supposed to be okay so you're stitching away you're stitching away you're getting used to going left and right and up and down and I'm almost finished with [Applause] the vertical lines and then they go back into the horizontal um you can also play around a little bit here if you want to although we're gonna do that later you could you know try to connect some dots together if you want but really this block is meant to be getting more used to horizontal vertical lines and stitching over top of previous stitch lines your goal is to stitch as close to what you had stitched before as possible so here I'm lining up all of these lines I I did this as one inch as a one inch grid so it's lining up on all of these ruler lines which makes it really fun makes you feel like oh hey I think I'm I'm on it I have it now I didn't adjust anything and you can see I'm just a thread off of that line but you know what it's fine okay so as you're doing this you are just getting more comfortable with going up and down and left and right and feeling the ruler and the pressure and not being scared of it it's if you're brand new to your machine and two rulers I get it there's a lot going on and you may be overwhelmed I've told this story before in my and some of my first videos that I was so so excited to get my machine and get it all set up and everything but I was scared of it for several weeks and you know I I quilted on it I wasn't so good but I was just scared of it so but at the same time I wanted to work on it so bad but try to get comfortable from your machine get comfortable with your tools we just stitched out this crosshatch hopefully you stitched along with me and if you were in the class you would have done it and then someone else would have done one someone else would have done another one if you're by yourself or if you're in a class and you get your own machine and your own panel you get to stitch three of them so anyway work on that that one's a lot of fun and then instead of going down we're gonna actually move over and we're gonna look at the diagonal block in just a second let's do the same thing that we've done with our other blocks and we're going to do an outline this is one where I would walk my fingers because I feel more comfortable doing that and adjusting the ruler as I need it okay so again remember about pressure quick review with the ruler going this way the Machine going this way and gently cluck guiding away from me so watch my right hand I'm pressing in towards this direction but I'm also moving away from me okay and then we'll do the top right now I'm lining up this line with the block and using that as sort of a reference I kept my hands right where they were the whole time my thumb was down below the curve a little bit really it's it's whatever works for you whatever feels the best without too much pressure and too much drag so you're gonna have to get used to how much pressure you need look at how I'm rotating the ruler what looks like a quarter-inch to me all the way across somewhere about like that okay so I'm gonna try it and I'm gonna start stitching and if I need to stop and adjust I will if we need to move my fingers I will okay I felt okay about that see what that feels like to you now you're going on a diagonal versus up and down or left and right see if you can track over what you've stitched before and again I I know I I'm going from top to bottom but I'm keeping the ruler towards me while I'm doing it so again but up next to the hopping foot pivot this ruler until I feel like I'm still 1/4 inch away from that line we'll see how it goes okay so I've got my my fingers pressured there my thumb is off of the ruler I'm gonna stop I'm gonna walk my fingers walk my fingers and there we go okay backtrack over your line ruler up against the foot pivot until it looks like it's quarter inch all the way concentrate your pressure closer to the foot now watch if I had my pressure down here remember this is where it starts to get that unbalanced thing so even though I'm pivoting I'm pivoting from here and the pressure needs to stay where the hopping foot isn't where the ruler base is underneath okay so I'm stitching down them I'm noticing I'm getting a little bit off so I'm adjusting the ruler just a little bit okay I'm gonna walk my fingers down walk my fingers down I'm a little bit off on that one close enough though okay now this is the long one so I'm gonna do my best with this ruler I'm not sure which camera is picking this up but see almost to the end of the line I've got the edge of this ruler touching that that's a good way to guesstimate that you'll be on the line unless there's some stretch with your fabric here so here we go walking my fingers walking my fingers I'm gonna stop and now I can use the bottom of the ruler to put it on the line to finish that line yeah it's pretty good okay and now we're gonna go down and you could you could experiment now if you feel more comfortable putting the ruler over here now to this side you may do what you like if you want to get a good start you could do what I just did before with that needle stop and you could put the needle stop see how I'm following that the edge of this on that line you could put the needle stop down here towards the bottom okay I'm walking my fingers and my thumb I'm gonna stop a little bit off there and now I'm going to extend down here we go okay see what's more comfortable for you with these ruler to the left of the foot ruler to the right by now you may be getting a rhythm now I'm going back to the other side see what you like you don't have to stay the same all the time you don't have to decide but if you're doing a whole quilt and you've got some repeating patterns you're gonna end up figuring out oh by the end of the quilt you like okay this is the way I should go or I should have gone okay so we did the diagonal easy-peasy yeah okay so you've got two more to do if you bought the panel and now let's go down to the next one [Music]

Channel: Michael Quilts

Views: 18,422

Rating: 4.9171596 out of 5

Keywords: Quilting, Longarm Quilting, Machine Quilting, Long Arm Quilting, Quilting with Rulers, Ruler Work, Michael Davison, Michael Quilts, Quilts, Quilting Machine, Custom Quilting, Innova Longarm, Longarm Quilting with, Rulers, Quilt Co, Free Motion Quilting, Quilt Tutorial, Quilting Tutorial, Longarm Tutorial, Longarm Class, Quilting Class, Online Quilting Class, Stitch in the Ditch, Ruler Work 101

Id: Ij_Qp87B9Rs

Length: 43min 1sec (2581 seconds)

Published: Mon May 25 2020