Ruler Foot Machine Quilting Basics - Quilting Basics Tutorial #13 with Leah Day

hello my quilting friends Lia day here with a new quilting basics video today I want to share with you the basics of ruler foot quilting this is a new form of quilting on our home machines that has actually been inspired by quilting on long arms so it's a really cool technique but it does require a ruler foot and rulers in order to get started so let's first learn about the ruler foot and why we need this special foot for this type of machine quilting the first thing to talk about with ruler foot quilting is your ruler foot and this is a very specially designed foot for this style of quilting so you can see it has a nice wide base here that allows us to press our ruler or templates up against the base of the foot and it also is 1/2 of an inch all the way around when I put it on my machine you'll see that my needle lands right in the center position right in the center position that means that if my needles in center position then I have a quarter of an inch to both sides and I can easily quilt lines that are spaced a quarter of an inch apart and any you know quarter inch half inch 3/4 of an inch I can pretty much do that spacing really really easily now something really important to keep in mind about ruler foot quilting is the height of your ruler foot and that this is a very big foot to use on your machine I know it might not look like that but this high edge is very unusual for a home sewing machine so this changes something important and that is how you do your needle down so right now I have my thread and I want to pull my bobbin thread up to the surface so what I'm going to do is drop my needle down into the down position I'm going to bring it all the way up and sew my needles almost about to go back down again I'm going to hold on to this top thread I'm going to slide the quilt away and I'm going to tug on it again that's going to bring my bobbin thread up it's also going to pull my top thread underneath the foot now let me do this again and show you what not to do notice that my foot was never in the up position if you have your foot in the up position and you try and drop your needle guess what happens your needle bar will hit the top of the foot not all machines are like this but it's enough it's common enough that you have got to watch out for it never drop your needle with your foot up put your foot in the down position and then drop your needle and that will ensure nothing gets messed up and nothing gets damaged on your machine okay so my bobbin thread is up on the surface I'm going to put my needle in the down position and I want to space out and stitch another line a quarter-inch away so I have my ruler here and this is one of the rulers from The Dresden Plate template set this is ruler number one template number one and I've placed some true grips here there little grippy kind of rubbery doughnuts and I stuck them to the line side and that way it's going to grip the fabric and allow me to kind of get a nice grip on the whole thing so the template doesn't slip as I'm quilting so with that in place what I'm doing here is I'm pressing down on the template and I'm pressing it against the ruler foot and I'm also making sure that I'm lined up with the edge of the template is lined up with the edge of my previous line of stitching because I want to stitch a quarter inch away so I'm stitching on down I'm just pressing gently on the template and it's interesting is that this actually feels really easy because the template is giving you this much space this much surface area to grip the quilt its gripping that surface it's really nice so I'm going to stitch down and I'm going to kind of guesstimate maybe a half an inch because I want to show you something cool about ruler foot quilting this is actually a form of free motion quilting and I have my machine in the exact same settings that I use for free motion quilting which means that I've got my stitch length set to zero and I've got a supreme slider here on the surface of my machine bed and that's covering up the feed dogs so those are the settings that I like for free motion quilting and I want to emphasize that you can do everything that you do in free motion with your ruler foot attached of course you can't see quite as well as you normally do but you could wiggle right into a design like stippling so you can use your ruler foot for free motion quilting you can also use your ruler foot for ruler foot quilting with the aid of some ruler so you can go straight into straight lines you can put your ruler away and go into step align or any other free motion quilting design and this is something that I think is really interesting and I want to play with a lot this year just seeing how to combine designs how to use the rulers to make straight lines and certain curves in certain shapes easier but then also how to keep blending them together so that you can use these filler designs easier too so you can break up your quotes and get them quilted faster now I have had a lot of questions about the thickness of rulers and the ruler foot and I am using just a regular template thickness here this is an eighth of an inch thick acrylic template and I'm finding that this works just fine on this foot and I am using a low shank adapter here with a low shank ruler foot and that's working just fine for me now you will need to test this depending on your machine if your foot hops up and down if your foot seems to have a lot more space underneath it you'll need to play with this and see if it feels safe to use these thinner templates on your machine on long arms that have a hopping foot you should use thicker templates and there are long arm rulers and templates are usually a quarter inch thick they're just a usually about double the thickness and that just ensures that the foot the ruler will never slip underneath the foot and potentially damage your machine so keep that in mind these rulers that I've designed are really designed for home sewing machines only and these ruler feet so that's it for this video I really hope that you enjoyed learning more about ruler foot quilting it's a really neat technique and I can't wait to play with it more if you'd like to find the templates I used in this video you can find them at lia DICOM slash Dresden Plate you can use them to cut Dresden plates you could also use them for ruler foot quilting on your home machine if you have any questions about this video please ask in the comments below I really want to answer your questions and help you start quilting on the right foot if you enjoyed this video please share it with your friends and subscribe to our channel on youtube so you don't miss out on the next quilting video coming out soon until next time let's go to quilt

Channel: Leah Day

Views: 129,778

Rating: 4.9057751 out of 5

Keywords: quilting, ruler quilting, ruler work, quilting with rulers, free motion quilting, machine quilting, quilting rulers, machine quilting with rulers, ruler foot, how to quilt with rulers, how to quilt video, free quilt tutorial, ruler foot quilting, machine quilting tutorial, sit down ruler work, quilting with rulers on a home machine, straight ruler quilting, how to use a ruler foot, ruler quilting on home machine, Leah Day, quilting basics, quilting basics tutorial

Id: u0zR07pqVUo

Length: 7min 24sec (444 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2017