Quilting with Rulers! Learn to finish your quilts on your home sewing machine

hello and welcome to quilt addicts anonymous I'm Stephanie 7 today we're going to be talking about really work for your domestic sewing machine I did a video about a month or so ago about using real work for your longer but it also can be done on your domestic so that way you can finish your quilts at home just like the long arm one I really like ruler work because it makes me look better than I am when it comes to quilting because you are always going to be in contact with a template this is going to help you quote super straight lines so you can absolutely get this down and create some really pretty quilting with it I'll show you some examples of some quilts that I've done with ruler work while we're chatting about it but there are a few things that you need to get started the first of them is a ruler foot so it looks like this we've got clear ones available at shopped at quilt leather synonymous calm it has a circle around it so that way when it is in contact with your ruler no matter where you are with that it's always going to be exactly a quarter inch away from your needle so that allows you to create really stunning designs with not a lot of effort which is great so you need to know if your sewing machine has a low medium or high shank the shank is apart that this attaches to on your sewing machine a good chunk of domestic sewing machines have low shank options but some of them have medium and some have high so just check your manual on both your machine manufacturer to see which one you have and then you can order these from US over there so everything you see here you can get from us and if you like these free video tutorials we appreciate it if you want to give this a go if you get the supplies from us because it helps support us and helps us be able to bring you free quilting tips and tricks every week all right so you're also going to need some rulers and these are thicker than your standard rulers that you use to cut fabric with it's about a quarter inch thick and that's so that it will fit nicely it's about the exact same height as this ruler foot and if you were shorter then this might pop up and go on top of it you hear crunching acrylic and sound so you want to get one that's specifically designed to work with long arm or your domestic and the ones that I'm going to use today for the domestic are the slim designed by angela walters available from creative grids or the ones who make this and Alvira i like these for the domestic my favorite hands-down ruler for ruler work is natalya bond or sporran one but i feel like that one is a little too big to work on most domestic sewing machines if you've got a sit-down mid arm or you've got a ton of throat space then you can use that one but if you're working with something like a real basic model and you're also trying to get your whole quilt underneath there you want something that's a little bit more compact and so angela has I believe eight of these out right now we have all of them but if you just want to give it a try I would go with slim because you can do your straight-line quilting with it and then I'll Vyra because you can get some nice curves in your piecing with that one and between those two that'll give you enough to give it a try and then you can add a few more as you go and if you like this I'll do demo a few of the other ones too because we had them all at the shop so the reason why I like these is they have both white and black hash marks on them so whether you're working with light or dark fabric you're going to be able to see the lines and also they've got grippy stuff on the back so it's going to stay put like you can see my entire fabric is moving and I'm just putting a little bit of pressure on the ruler and when you do this you are moving the ruler you're putting it in place and then you're moving your fabric so that's really important you don't want it to slide around same thing with this one you can see the black and white lines and it's got the grips on the back I also highly recommend that you have a pair of machiners quilting gloves I like them because they're pretty lightweight and breathable so if it's a hot summer day or you have your own personal summers these are so good you can still use them and then they've got little groupies and the finger tips that help you move it everything around and really I like to use these friction gel pens anytime I'm doing ruler work then I can mark things and it will go away with heat but for today I'm going to show you just some exercises that you can do at home with a fat quarter and you can just grab solids are great because then you can see everything really clearly but if you want to just grab some fat quarters that you regret buying this is a really good exercise for that because then you can just give it a try and then it's just a practice piece and you don't have to worry about it I'm using black today we have three different colors at the shop and I know sometimes people poopoo these because they say that the lines come back and they do if they go out in freezing temperatures but I have a quilt that has traveled all across the country that I marked the heck out of with these so that I did ruler across the entire top and haven't heard any complaints yet and if it does ever come back all you do is iron it again and the marks go away again so you're good to go all right well let's get started so the first thing we want to get down is just a quilt a straight line and you can get a lot of angles going with this but to start with let's just work on quilting a very very straight line so what I'm going to suggest that you do is make a mark two inches from the corner of your test piece and what I did was I just took a half yard of fabric folded it over and put some scrap batting that was leftover from a whole team project in the center put that a little bit darker so you guys can see it at home so I've got a line there and then I'm going to mark a line two inches down from that as well and any marking tool will do I just like these because they go away and then you're just gonna see your quilting which is kind of fun and then also if you get off a little bit nobody deal no one knows that you were off so that's always fun one thing I didn't mention but it's super helpful is if you have an extended base for your machine that's going to be ideal is you need to be able to have your hands on here and your ruler and that needs to be able to lie flat so if you can do that and get that going with your sewing machine that's ideal otherwise it's just going to be hard to keep everything nice and flat while you're working you also want to make sure that you lower your feed dogs on mine there's just little thing in the back that I just push down and then they lower because you are going to be the one who's moving your fabric around not your feed dogs in this case it's kind of like free motion in that respect but in others it's very different alright so the first thing I'm going to do is bring my thread up to the top just like you will be free motion quilting you want to bring that bobbin thread up to the top now it's not super important on a test piece like this because it's just a test piece it's just an example to see how things go but you want to get in the habit of doing it so you don't have a whole mess of thread underneath your quotes alright so what I'm going to do is I'm going to line up the ruler so that is exactly even with the edge of my ruler flip there and then I'm going to hold that in place and I'm going to start moving everything when you do this you kind of got to get your rhythm in order so you want to get the sewing machine going of specific speed you may need to do some tension adjustments I definitely do a mine all right so I finally got my attention and just so you know if the bobbin thread is poking up through the top then that means you need to decrease your tension if it's poking down through the bottom they need to increase your tension but what I'm doing here is I am just holding my ruler and my fabric and I'm just pushing those along and I'm making sure that my ruler is always in contact with that ruler foot and if I do that then I'm going to be able to make a nice straight line so for my second stitch in line I'm going to go ahead and put my ruler to the right of the ruler foot now to me that is more awkward you do kind of have to get used to having the ruler going in different places but I'm gonna put it on the right so that way you can see a little easier how the ruler foot is always going to be in contact and the other thing you want to know is there's kind of a sweet spot in this I really am only gonna quilt from like one inch in on either side because if I get any further out than that one I could accidentally go around this curve and then my straight leg would not be straight anymore and two you just don't have as much control when you're on the outside there so I kind of start about an inch in and then go about an inch out so I'm going to go ahead and get my rhythm here and get sewing and once I feel like I've gone far enough and I don't have that control anymore I just stop with my needle down and start again and your goal here is not only to always keep everything in contact with that ruler but also to make sure that your stitches are nice and even in their length and that just takes practice so you can see here the goal is just to keep your stitches straight and even and you do that by controlling the speed of your machine versus the speed you are moving your piece so if your stitches are too wide apart then you either need to slow down your machine or how fast you are moving or both try to do just one at a time so you can kind of get used to what works and what doesn't in terms of speed control my machine has a little knob on it where I can change the speed so I usually move it down to medium when I'm doing this that way I can sort of press the pedal down kind of fast and but I'm not going to go too fast when I do this so what you can do here is if you feel like you need to do it a few more times to get down draw few more straight lines and do that or you can use the lines on the tool as a guide so what you can do is you can line up some of those hash marks with the line that you just sewed over and then you can stay in line and that's a good thing to work on because one it reduces the amount that you have to mark and so then you can just kind of get it going a little bit faster and then also then you just don't have as much to remove at the end so that's always good all right so what I did next is I drew a line four inches away from the line that I just drew then I drew lines in four inch segments so it was like I was creating a four inch square and I drew little hash marks two inches away from the side so right smack dab in the center on each of those so what we're going to do is we're gonna aim for those all right so I'm gonna go ahead and stitch on that line that I drew and again normally I would have my ruler on the left because that just works a little bit better for me but I'm gonna put it on the right of my ruler foot for this one so you can kind of see what's going on a little bit better on camera it for those of you watching at home I have switched sewing machines because I'm not I mean off of my other one that's not working very well right now so if you I just put the ruler foot on another machine if you're having issues where your ruler foot you can't like move the fabric underneath it first see if your machine has a free motion stitching setting and select that if not all you have to do is just raise this up just a little bit to give it a little bit of space and then retighten that screw because if it is too far down then it's not gonna work right all right so think of this part as like stitching in the ditch and this can actually replace stitching in the ditch once you dip a hang of it and if you listen you can hear that the machine is going really steadily it's not like taking off and going it's just that a nice medium speed cuz I've reduced the maximum speed my SOI machine can go they're just moving kind of slow as I go through this whenever I have to stop I stop with that needle down and then I stitch in place a time or she when I get going again that way I don't have any jerky movements when I get going again all right so now I quilt it away from the side there and now I've got a little hash mark right here and make that little juggler see hopefully you guys can see it at home so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to position my rear foot a quarter inch away from the edges where I'm working so I've got my corner here and then I've got so so that my needle ends up right where that little hash mark meets my sewing part but if I put this ruler right on top of it because this part is a quarter inch away from the needle at all times I would end up hitting a quarter inch away from that so you kind of want to get used to eyeballing working a quarter inch away now I found with the domestic that it doesn't really work very well to have this behind here there's not enough clearance so what you want to do is try to always be working from the front or the sides of your foot here and rather than going behind if you can avoid it so first I'm going to go ahead and start off by getting my needle down in the center so this is a practice piece I'm not going to pull my bobbin thread up every time but you would want to do that if you were doing it as the real deal so now I'm getting everything lined up so that I'm a quarter inch away and now we're going to quilt sideways again still making sure that we're trying to keep that nice even stitch length and always keeping that ruler foot even with the edge of your ruler all right so I was able to stitch right in to where that point was and now I'm going to be going back down the bottom again so now I want to go down to the bottom of where the square is so right here and again I don't want it to go right even with it I want to line that up about a quarter inch away and it takes some getting used to to figure out how you need to arrange your ruler in order to make that happen but it it comes with practice and once you get it down it's really easy and again I'm only quilting within like that inner six inches or so and that ruler I'm not going beyond the outer edges so I'm just holding this still with both hands and then using my thumb and pinky to kind of move keep on the fabric and my middle fingers are on that ruler and then I'm just kind of moving everything along here so I hit that Center so we're going to rotate and again I'm going to try to hit quarter-inch away all right now we're just going to keep going back on down and we're just going to keep rotating that to try to hit that so if you were doing this if you had four inch squares you could make that happen and it would turn out really cute now if you find you're ever getting it off you want to just do a subtle little movement with that ruler you don't want to do a big jerky movement because that people can notice but if they are like going along and you think gee I and not gonna hit that point it is not going to happen you just want to like subtly move that ruler just a teeny little bit and then you'll be okay but if you just try to yank it back in place it's it's not going to look good it's not going to work out and you want to try not to move your fabric sideways like twisting and turning it if you think about it if you're doing this on a big quilt you're not going to be able to twist and turn it like that you really have to be able to work from side to side front to back and so that's what you want to do when you're practicing glue that works so now you can see I got my lines where I drew everything and I just stitch in until we got to a hash mark and then stitch right back out to create these triangles if you'd like to have a little bit more practice then make a hash mark on the other side of the triangle and go back and forth going the other way what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw another line on here and we're going to practice working with some curves so this time I'm going to make my marks three inches away because I want to be able to work on some curves and sit into a yellow marking tool not when I normally use that I'm hoping it'll show up a little better and it is so that's good and then I'm going to do three inch increments and I'm going to bisect that as though I had done a half square triangle so first I'm going to mark all my three inch increments you guys can do that at home as well alright so now I'm also when to draw some triangles as though I had sewn a half square triangle so when we do the triangles we're going to have a path that we do and you kind of have to work out that path because you want to be able to start and stop as little as possible so what we can do is we can start in the corner and we can come up and then we can come down and do this part and then we're going to ignore this part for now we're just going to come back up and then come back down and we're just going to do one half of these to start with and then we'll come back and we'll fill it in a little bit at a time as we go but then that way we don't have to start and stop as much and it works out really well all right so first when we do that stitch in the ditch to hold everything together this is how I would do it if I were closing it for real to always secure the top and bottom of the block and then go for the insides so like I said earlier I find it really hard to work with the template and back of your presser foot when you're doing on your domestic because there just isn't enough clearance so what I like to do when I'm doing curves is go from side to side instead of front to back so this is again where I said at the very beginning that you kind of have to get used to working all different angles of this because you are moving all around but you're not like twisting the quilt so you'll see how that works there so I'm going to go ahead and roll this up so I've got some clearance go ahead and put that needle down remember I'm just gonna do one half of this at a time so we're going to start off here and what I'm trying to do here is kind of position it so that it's nice and even and again so that that curve is exactly a quarter inch away from the point of the triangle and then we're going to follow the curved line around and curves are tricky with getting them into that corner so you may have to adjust more with a curve than you did with your straight line all right so I've got that nice curve now going down the side so now I'm going to adjust it here and I want to go up to that corner now all right now again I'm just going to do that diagonal curve and then the vertical curve going all the way through so I'm just getting one half at a time here and again I'm I found it real tricky if I could not get this behind I'm always going to work from the front and the sides of that foot I'm just following the curve of the ruler going up and then back down moving the ruler and the fabric as one alright so now I quilt up half of that now we're going to go in and we're going to quilt the other half of it by getting the side and the front and then the side and the front and working our way down that way alright for this part of it I found it is easier to work from front to back so just be flexible with how you're working it but pick one direction left to right or front to back when you're working on something and it'll go a lot smoother so in this case I want to aim for where my threads all kind of came together because if you miss that then it's harder to hit it you know alright so now we're going to go around here all right so if you do have to work them back if there's no way around it what you do is you kind of lift this up and then set it down on back there and it will kind of work itself ouch it just won't go down as far as you need it to all right now one thing I'm going to do before I do the top and bottom of this is I'm gonna go back and I'm going to quilt over the straight lines that way you guys can see a little easier where they coordinated its are and you can also see how you can travel over lines pretty easily what I did here is I'm just gonna sew down that way and then I'm just going to travel back because I've got a diagonally this way so I want to just sew back without having a break thread and as long as you kind of have a thinner thread I use our full 50 weight when I'm working on this you can stitch right through it and it's not too obvious that you've gone over your stitch lines so I'm kind of looking behind me let's see where I'm going and get everything nice and lined up now you do not have to do this at home I am just doing it so that way you guys can kind of see where the points should be because I just feel like the lines that I'm drawing are not showing up at swallowing camera as I should so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to do the top and bottom all together so to do that it gets pretty easy all you have to do is line up your ruler with where you're working and you're just going to stitch over and into that point and again if you have to make adjustments because you think you're not going to hit that point just go nice and slow with your adjustments and it won't be very obvious that you switch directions with the last minute now I'm going to jog over here and now I'm going to work going back this time I've got the ruler on the left side and we're going to go backwards all right so these zigzags represent your piecing and then these arcs are what you can do on the inside and this is why you know my favorite is that form one ruler so if you have a larger machine throat and you can fit that in there do it because the curves for this one they're great they're pretty you can do a lot of great things with them but if you're just trying to get some cute little arcs in your triangles this isn't super ideal for it and the form one is a lot better but again it's a little big for in here I've tried some of the other curved ones that are made for more of a domestic machine and none of them are really like awesome so what I'm gonna do with the second half here is I'm going to go ahead and stitch in the stitching lines first and then I'm going to show you how you can do some nice sharp Peaks and they're using the straight line ruler and that looks really fabulous too and then you guys can just go ahead and give this go at home alright so I've stitched down the lines that I drew so you can see it really clearly at home and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to line my ruler up so that it's even with those points going across I'm going to take my marking tool and I'm just going to make marks and I'm using these as reference lines so what I'm going to do when I go through all of these is I'm going to line it up so that this second hash mark is even with the tip of my triangle so that way I'm going to be able to stitch out to the triangle stop with my needle down readjust so that I'm a quarter inch away from here and then go into the side and then when I come back around I can do the same thing here where I line it up so that the tip is even with that second hash mark I can come out to the front come here and then stitch to the side and then I'm gonna need to travel because I need to get back to a point so what I'm going to do is I'm going to stitch right back over this line and then I'm going to repeat the process of winding up stitching to the center changing direction coming over here and going around like that so I'm going to show you how I do that this is probably aside from doing the arcs in it with the forum one ruler the one I do most often it really makes something pop it really is pretty easy to do once you get the hang of it and once you really get used to it you don't even have to mark you can just kind of eyeball where that Center is but at the first I recommend that you make those marks just line it up from point to point and just make it about halfway and that gives you a good spot to change directions all right so I'm lining up that point again just like I showed you from before I'm gonna try to do it without holding on to the tip here normally I would hold on right here as well but then you won't really be able to see that's easily what I'm doing it's gonna so in keeping that ruler in contact until I hit that corner then I'm going to and again normally I would have it on the side here but so you can see a little easier at home I'm going to line it up on the left side or the right side of me my presser foot and then I'm going to aim for where that seam is all right so we've got that now I'm gonna go and go the other way again I've got that lined up with the corner the marks on the rulers can be very helpful for things like that now I'm going to head back to this side and now we need to travel to get to the next bit so what I'm going to do is I'm going to travel down this line that we already stitched in the ditch and again as long as you're using it thin enough thread because you're using that ruler you're going to be able to do it without it getting too much and build up or looking at like you made a mistake okay so we're going to line that up again lining up that dotted line with the point and we're just gonna hold everything in place move it along as we go until we hit that Center stop with that needle down and then stitch to the next corner stitch over [Applause] all right so that is your intro to real work using your domestic sewing machine again that Luther foot is critical you need that so that way you're always a quarter inch away from you as your templates slim it's probably my favorite for the domestic sewing machine so if you just want to get one tool to give it a try I would go with this one because you can play with these rounded edges and try and do a little bit of curves with that you could do all of these straight lines here you can do these lines here and you could just keep going and getting that as intense as you want like you could keep going in the middle and it's just endless possibilities there lots of fun if you're going to try a curvy one elvirus is good once you give it a try you've got a couple of different curves you can do you've got this one here you've got the big wavy line you've got a concave one all of the ones come with instructions I kind of give you some ideas of things that you can do with them and again this curvy line I mean it's got to be like the right size in order to do it obviously it worked pretty good on the straight away here but this diagonal it was a little bit too long and it ends up looking a little bit messy so you can experiment it you can see how you'd like it my favorite curve is the arc and the Nathalia Bonners four-in-one Brugler love it but i think it's a little bit too big for the domestic unless you have a really big throat that you're working with or you're working with like a sit-down mid arm or something I would highly recommend using the machiners quilting gloves that way you can grip and move everything really easily and some sort of a marking tool that will go away with heat the friction gel pens I can see that really well here but I feel like you probably can't see them on camera but those are what my preferred method is I can see them really really well so again start with that straight line quilting and get that down first then draw some grids and just practice going up and down to create some more texture and again you could always practice going back and forth the other way to create some more texture then once you get a little bit fancier you can quote inside half square triangles and you can try some curves so I hope you really enjoy this I've heard from a lot of you as we've been doing more tips and tricks on how to pull on your home sewing machine that you really feel empowered to give it all a try so I hope you do again we've got everything you need over at shop quilt a taxonomist comm if you've seen one of our tutorials and you want to give it a go we really appreciate it when you get the supplies from us because it helps us be able to bring you more free tutorials every week so thanks so much if there's anything else you want to see me do pop it in the comment box below and we'll see if we can get it on the video schedule thanks so much and until next week happy quilting [Music]

Channel: Quilt Addicts Anonymous

Views: 91,310

Rating: 4.8405628 out of 5

Keywords: Angela Walters, Angela Walters Slim, Angela Walters Elvira, rulerwork, ruler work, ruler work quilting, rulerwork quilting, quilting on your home sewing machine, finish your quilts at home, ruler foot, quilt addicts anonymous, quilt addictsanonymous tutorials, Stephanie Soebbing, machine quilting, quilting tutorials

Id: PljOCS4Vaes

Length: 31min 29sec (1889 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 04 2019