Rulerwork Quilting Triangles! Great quilting designs for half square triangles

hello and welcome to quilt addicts anonymous i'm stephanie subbing today we're going to be doing a quilt play-by-play where we show you what i've done and the decisions i've made while i'm actually quilting it so you get to see from my point of view on our gopro camera and i'm going to sort of talk you through why i'm doing what i'm doing so you can replicate that at home so we're going to be doing more ruler work today we did a video on that last not for stash but for another quilt that we did and today i'm going to be using slim this one was designed by angela walters this one works really well on a long arm or on a home sewing machine because it's kind of a smaller profile it fits you can see really nicely behind the palm of my hand it's just not very large reasons why i like this ruler is it's got a really nice straight edge here and also it has both white and black dotted lines so it makes it a little easier to see no matter what you're working on one of those is going to show up and it also has these grippies on the back that's not super important if you're working on a long arm but if you're working on a home sewing machine it's nice because it kind of grips to the fabric and it's easier to move everything as one piece one thing that i don't love about this ruler is it does not have a one inch marking it has half three quarter and then it goes all the way to one and a half so i would have loved for them to have another one right down here but there's grips there so maybe that's why they don't have it but again that's my only reason that makes this ruler not absolutely perfect but it's really nice you also have inch markings and half inch markings going down the sides of the ruler but we're going to use it today to help work around our quilt to create these nice triangles to mimic the triangles that are in the quilt the quilt itself this one is called tropical grove it's our station with stephanie design for the month and just real quick before we get any further stash with stephanie is a subscription club that we run here at quilt addicts anonymous you get 10 fat quarters for 29.99 a month plus shipping then we also develop a pattern that's been inspired by the fabrics this is this month's pattern and you get that for free as part of your subscription you can download it on our website we do a tutorial on how to piece it how to quilt it and then later in the week we're going to have an interview with the designer of this when you join in addition to your bundle and your fabric and your pattern each month you also get access to our entire library of patterns that we designed for stashing with stephanie it is almost a 300 value now so that is a really awesome deal that you get right when you sign up um actually within like about 24 hours when we send you the coupon code and then um you also get a special discount on my book fat quarter workshop which has even more fat quarter friendly patterns so lots of fun great stuff you get first dibs on this fabric and this month our stash with stephanie members fell in love with it they bought up almost all of the fabric before we even released it to our youtube subscribers and our email list so uh there just wasn't much left there were scraps so if you guys want to make sure you're getting awesome fabric and you're getting first dibs on it go check that out if you sign up by the end of may your first bundle will come on june 20th is when we'll ship it if you sign up june 1st or later then your subscription is going to come on july 20th all right so we're going to get into the cool team play by play and ruler work i i personally love ruler work because it makes me look like a lot better quilter than i am i could not do all these really beautiful straight lines without the gade of my ruler also we always talk about thread here so we should do that so i'm using my trusty uh bone i use this in like anything that has white in the background and it's nice because it blends in and it just creates the texture you don't really see anything else and for that i did use a white background even though i did not have a white back on this on this kit i want to try and match it as best i can because then if i ever have any tension issues it's not a big deal because you are not going to see that bobbin thread poking up whereas if i match it and i have like a teal back then i would have little teal dots all through my white nobody wants that for the and this is all from glide by the way i use their 40 weight and i like the one that's 100 polyester and has a little bit of sheen i find it's really good when you have to travel over the stitches because it doesn't have a lot of build up like it doesn't end up looking like a thick line if you've ever done that a lot with like a thicker cotton thread you know what i'm talking about it's not pretty but you just don't see that with with this glide um for the teal bits i used color 37468 it's called ocean and i used it on the dark and the lighter bit so it's obviously more obvious it shows up more when you get to the darker part it matches almost perfectly with this and then it just blends in the darker so you got to be confident what you're doing if you don't want to switch threads all the time i thought three threads and this was more than enough um i mean i certainly could have and i have in the past switch colors um for each color value so like this would be really dark and then that would be kind of more medium like this one and then i would have switched to light here i've done that in the past didn't want to do that here because i was on a deadline it was already crazy enough getting this done and normally i would have done like something super simple and easy but this quote was just like stephanie i know you don't have a lot of time and this needs to be done tonight but we would like to have ruler work so you're gonna have to make that happen so i said okay quilt we're gonna we'll do that for you and it looks stunning i love it i'm glad i took the extra time but uh not not always the technique you want to do when you're on a deadline unless you're okay with staying up until midnight to finish it like i did all right so for the magenta and pinks and a little bit of purple here for that one i chose color 60151 wine this is actually a variegated thread the variegations i can see them more on here than i can on the actual quilt on the quilt it looks more like a solid i can see little bits where it's definitely lighter and again it blends really well with the dark it shows up a little bit in this medium shows up a lot in these darker ones it actually matches pretty nicely with the backgrounds of these little fruits but it really does show up quite a bit on here you got to be okay with that you got to be confident that you're not going to have some squirrelly looking lines so that way you're you don't want to be ashamed of looking at your quilt we don't want that i use this dark gray almost this kind of green for my bobbin and that is just the closest thing i had on hand to these two colors so when i was using these i did switch over to this color again so if it does pop up through the top it's not as obvious obviously it's not the exact same to either of these but it's close enough and that's close enough is good enough in this case you don't need to have every single bobbin color under the sun in order to make your quilting work all right now let's actually look at the quilting alright so you can see i'm getting started here with slim and first thing i'm doing is i'm outlining the outside of those triangles i really like to get my outline down first because it gives me a nice path to follow and that way i can just travel along it if i need to and it also creates some really great texture so i've gotten all the way around and i've got to travel back to my corner and i'm lining up that middle dotted line with the tip of that triangle and now i'm going to line up the side about a quarter inch away from the point now you got to remember whenever you're doing ruler work your ruler foot which is a very special attachment that you have to have it's like non-negotiable it is a full circle around your needle it should be a quarter inch away on the outside of all of it than from your needle so as long as you are positioning your ruler a quarter inch away from wherever it is you would like to be sewing as long as you keep that ruler foot in contact with the ruler all times you're going to be able to stitch that shape out all right so i've outlined the entire triangle again again we're going to travel up to the top and then we're going to position that middle dotted line which is super easy to see right along there and in the past when i was getting used to doing things like this i would mark that center i would just take a ruler and a friction gel pen that goes with heat and i would just mark right along between where the points are i'd line it up and then i would know where i would need to shift and turn but i've probably done thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of triangles at this point so i'm comfortable just kind of winging it at this point that doesn't mean that all of mine turn perfectly evenly with the center of that triangle but it really doesn't matter if you're just quilting for you and you just enjoy the process so that's just something to think about all right so you'll notice that the white doesn't go all the way across and connect in all places so i did as much as i could with areas that connected from points to points and now i've got to stop and you can see my shoes in the bottom here let's ignore that so now i'm starting off in another white section that you can see in my um throw to my long arm now i quilt on a lenny apqs and i really like it it's one of their smaller machines but i'm very short so my arm length is is not very long and so it really doesn't matter if i have a huge throat space because i do everything hand guided so i just do whatever i can reach and one quilt blocks depth is perfectly fine and sufficient for me so i've got that first triangle outline i'm going to come down here and now i'm just going to keep traveling around again trying to make that path so that way i can make it as far across as i can in order to be able to do this in one pass without breaking threads all the time so you can see i'm just again working my way around i'm always going to outline first and in this case i don't necessarily have to go back over that stitching line because i did it when i did the this block above so i'm just traveling over what's already there in this case but i am still going around like this now i do find it's harder for me to have the ruler above like i just had it i find it easier to align the ruler to the side the left side and then below so right here i'm going to have a whole lot more control and i'm just lining that up about a quarter inch away you see i had to adjust it because i wasn't quite on to stay where i need to be and these seams are all pressed open so we got to talk about stitching the dish a little bit here i'm technically stitching like right next to the ditch and that is because the seams are pressed open so i don't want to go straight down the center of it which is not that different than what you would do if you press your seams to the side you're still going to be stitching to the side of a seam you're not stitching right down the middle of it but people kind of the quilt police like to complain about this and so i will tell you that i've done this many many times and not never had an issue all right so now i'm to the square that is kind of in the corner of this block and i wanted that one to look a little different and so i'm still doing that design where i'm essentially creating it quilting it as if it were two half square triangles but i'm having everything point to the center where the blocks meet just to create a little bit different visual element than what i'm creating with the triangles so i've made my way around i've quilted where it needs to still be quilted and now i'm going to travel out to get back to my triangle so that's kind of what you have to think about whenever you're doing this is how do i travel seamlessly from one section that needs to be quilted so the next section that needs to be quilted without having to break my thread and without having to travel more than is necessary over previously stitched areas so that's going to vary based on your design and it might vary in your block i definitely tested out several different paths when i was quilting this and some were better than others some were just as okay as others this is just what i did here all right so now we're coming around the side of the block and i promise i'll stop talking soon then you can just watch me quilt and what i'm doing here is i'm quilting all the way down the left side here and that way i'm able to really just uh keep going around and filling that area in nicely i also tested out ones where i quilted like this entire section like this it almost looks like a fine geese from that half of the block and the other half all together either is totally fine as long as you quilt all the pieces the same way so that there's uniformity but what i chose to do at least in this pass was to go all the way down quilting one half of the block at one time and then in a minute you're going to see me start the next block by quilting up the center [Music] all right so my first block is now completely quilted so now i'm just going to continue working my way across quilting as much as i can with the white thread and just hitting all those background pieces making sure i don't miss any but if i get to a point to where i can't connect to any more white spots then i'm going to stop i'm going to break my threads and i'm going to move on because and start at a new area because i don't want to travel over the printed pieces with the white because that'll be super obvious it's one thing to connect where you have white to white that you can't really see so much especially if you've done your points really well which we cover that in depth in our piecing tutorial so check that out if you have trouble with half square triangles but i'm just trying to travel and if i've got to go some over a line two three times as long as you have a really good thread that isn't going to have a lot of build up with that then you're awesome you're gonna make it it'll be look beautiful and you can really use that ruler to stay exactly on top now that doesn't mean i'm exactly on top with every single stitch but i try my best to be and then you just really can't tell where you stopped or started all right so we're going to go ahead and let this fast forward a little bit here you guys can watch it in you know double or triple time or whatever our video editor thinks looks best and you can see me work my way across the rest of the quilt top [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so all right so here i'm in one of those center areas that didn't connect to any white so i started my threads off there and i just locked my threads in place by sewing a couple of stitches front and back just like you would if you were locking stitches in when you're doing garments it's pretty much the same process so i'm just quilting along here and still doing my areas where i can just outline first and then do my triangles and i'm just working my way around to get this whole section and i'm just doing that separately and but as far as the way i work my way around it's still the same process i'm working my way doing one triangle and one half at a time and then working my way over to the next one and doing outlining first and then doing my little inner triangle you certainly can do more inner triangles obviously the more you do the more time it's going to take and if you do it for one you really want to commit to do it to all of them because otherwise it'll look a little funny and it won't be quilted with the same density if you ever get a cool judge that's something that they're going to look at is did you quilt everything with a similar density but this way i can just kind of work my way around i'm less likely to miss stuff i have had ones where like it was done quilted hanging on the wall and then i realized i missed like a triangle and let me tell you i've never gone back and quilted that triangle so i want to do it in as systematic as a way as i can so that i don't miss things like that all right we're going to watch just a little bit longer and then i'm going to show you how i break off the threads so that way i don't have to bury them you do want to bury your threads if you plan to have this judged ever but if you're just quilting for you as long as you lock those threads in place you can feel free to snip it and you'll be okay again it's the same thing as if you did it with a garment you stitch back and forth that locks it in so that it's not going to come apart when you're using it with the seam all right so now we're changing colors we're going to do our teal now we're going to hit all those blocks at once so the way i quilt this is i do all the background first because the background is the usually the biggest part of your quilt so that gets it nice and stabilized and in place from top to bottom then what i do is i work my way back up from bottom to top with whatever thread color i'm doing next in this case we're going to do teal now i'm going to show you how i lock my threads in place so that way i don't have to bury my threads this is something you want to do for sure if um you want to have it judged but if you're just doing it for you you absolutely can just do this it's kind of the same as if you back stitch a little bit when you're doing a garment it keeps everything in place so you can wear it and use it without it coming apart and i do this all the time i've never had any issues all right so i've already brought my bobbin thread to the top here and i'm just going back and forth just a couple of stitches and i'm doing that just manually turning the thumb nail back and forth and then i'm ready to get started and then when i'm done with that i can just snip those threads and i'll be good to go i don't have to worry about it i just snip it as close to the area as possible all right so for the areas that have prints what i did is i started in one corner and i'm gonna work my way across and i kind of did it two ways so i started doing it where i was doing one entire fabric at a time which is what you're going to see here and then later i started working just from left to right across the block and that worked out just fine but i'm quilting it the exact same way as i did the white the one difference here is because we have a lot more joining i have to do a lot less of the traveling because i don't have to go over every seam twice so you can see in this next one i've already quilted that bottom you can see it really clearly because the thread is darker than the fabric so i get to totally skip that and just go up to the top and then i can work my way back down to the point and again i've got better control whenever that ruler is more at the bottom so now i can quilt that inside and i never had to go over that bottom piece again it's just not necessary as long as it's quilted because you just want the texture that you're creating all right so now i am going to travel down this we previously stitched down it and i'm going to start moving on to the next colorway and it doesn't matter which way you go obviously i'm thinking about it here which way do i want to go first and in this case i'm just a diagonal so i'm quilting up to that corner none of this area has been stitched yet so i've got to outline the entire triangle before i do anything but essentially what i'm trying to do here is always if i can and then a point because then you have less traveling to do and that makes life just a little bit easier but i'm still doing it where i'm lining up the middle of that ruler with the point the right angle of the corner and then marking my way down all right so here i am you can see i'm traveling down that straight side so that way i'm at a corner because once i work my way around i'll be nice and at that corner again and i can do my inner triangle quilting inside of that to add my texture i could have done arcs2 if i wanted but i really wanted to accentuate the triangle nature of this quilt because when you put it together it looks like long strips and i wanted to help accentuate all those half square triangles that we worked so hard on in the piecing part of this all right so now that triangle is completely outlined and you can see that the angle is also completely outlined so we just had to do the bottom bit for that which is nice it makes it go a lot faster when you get to this step all right so i was able to just quilt across the bottom and then quilt the inner triangle and i get to travel and basically repeat so in this case i just have to go down the center seam and i get to go up the side seam and i am going to need to travel because obviously i can't uh start my inner triangle from the right angle i've got to get to one of the 45 degree angles to do that so i can just work my way around traveling as i go all right so for this one you're gonna see me go through the rest of the teal block basically doing the same thing traveling when necessary but for the most part if i've already stitched that line and i don't have to travel across it to get to the next point i don't i just let it be and just go faster what i what i do want to stress is no matter which way you decide to tackle this whether you're going right to left or whether you are going by print like i did in this block you want to make sure that you have some sort of a system so you don't miss any triangles because it's easy to do [Music] do [Music] all right so now we are working on our pink blocks so i'm changing thread again again i'm just tacking that in place and i will clip those threads later instead of bury them because i'm knotting everything really well there all right so now we've got the ruler and i think this is the one where i'm just working my way across and uh the last shot was shot at about midnight and this one is shot at about 8 am the next day so we i worked a lot to get this quilt done on time we always do but it is what it is so i'm just outlining again and then i'm going to do my inner triangle just like we've done all the way sometimes i pick different designs for my background versus my print sometimes i do the exact same it just depends on what i'm feeling that day and how i want to make it work and in this case i wanted it all to be the same button different in different threads so you can see here i'm just working my way across horizontally instead of doing one color at a time as i kind of got doing this i thought to myself why am i treating it like i am using one thread for every single one of these i think it might be easier to just go across and i think this was easier but it's not like the other way was wrong it was just a way to do it and this is a way to do it so you can experiment and feel figure out what works best for you and just know that as long as it gets done and it all gets quilted it really doesn't matter you can feel free to experiment a little bit with it now i am outlining this obviously i outline right next to it in teal so i'm really being careful to kind of like stay in my lane and keep the pink all on the pink so that way it doesn't cross over but even though i already have that texture right next to it i really like to outline the entire triangle in that color even though there's one that's really close to it next to it all right so i've got that whole section done or that whole first row so now we're going to move up and just kind of make our way back across this way now i will tell you that my machine doesn't always like to go from right to left it prefers the quote from left to right just the way we read as well so i am very careful in how i quilt through the work when i'm going from right to left so you'll notice that i'm choosing to go on an angle when i'm going from right to left as much as possible because my machine likes that better than doing a straight line going from right to left it does not like that very much it can do it for little bits here but it certainly can't do it for a long length of time the thread will start to shred on me now because i'm doing this as all at one time i'm able to quilt this a little bit differently you'll notice i just outlined the entire square first and now i'm doing my inner triangle on one half of the block with the hasker triangle now i'm going to do the same thing on the other and then i'm going to travel from the side of this block to the next one i have to quell by doing a diagonal through that center seam so everything still got quilted just like i normally would i just i'm doing it in a little bit different order so we'll follow that again i'm going across the top and now i'm going to quilt down and go outline that entire square and i didn't have to go up to the top on that one because we'd already quilted that side so i can just go straight into my inner triangles and then i'll travel again through that seam so like i said this isn't better or worse than the when i was doing it by print it's just a way just pick one be consistent with it so that way you don't leave out any triangles and then you're snuggling under it at some point to be determined and you're like shoot i missed that entire section you don't want to have that happen to you but as long as you have your plan you stick to it you pay attention as you go you're going to have some really great results and as far as ruler work is concerned as long as you have the right tools if you're on the long arm you need to have a what's called a ruler base basically it extends the width of your long arm and so that way when you have a ruler on top it's nice and flat instead of doing one of these wobbly bits on your long arm because they're usually pretty skinny and that way you're able to lay flat as you work around your table you need to have that ruler foot which is a solid circle they're either metal or plastic that goes all the way around your needle so that way you're always going to be a quarter inch away from what from your needle no matter what shape of these you're using and these long arm rulers are different than your regular quilting rulers long arm rulers are a full quarter inch thick of the acrylic your regular quilting rulers that you cut with are about an eighth of an inch thick that's so that your foot doesn't hop on top of it and crunch acrylic and get you endangered breaking needles that's not good you don't want that again this one's slim we do not sell these but you can get them from angela walters website we also do not sell the thread you can get that from heaven there probably are some other retailers because that is specifically to long arm like wholesalers but it's great stuff i really recommend it i also get all the pre-round bobbins so that's one less tension thing that i have to worry about i can just pop it in there and i've got it already set and i don't have to worry about it getting screwy and not working correctly which is bad we don't want that to happen but as long as you get the habit of keeping your ruler foot always in contact with your ruler you can quilt any shape you want obviously right now i'm doing a whole lot of straight lines and i'm doing a lot of flipping of the ruler and you get used to where to flip and how to flip and how best to work your way around the quilt the more you do it i've been doing this for several years now so it's but i still like you saw there were points where i was like do i want to go this way or do you want to go that way and you just kind of figure out sometimes in the moment and sometimes your muscle memory takes over but i like it i would not be able to put a design like this and have it turn out like it did without these tools you can do it with a walking foot but it's much more labor intensive and a lot harder to back because you're doing this constantly and going around and then you have to turn the quilts every single time you turn one of these and it's just super challenging which is why you would want to maybe use one of these and ruler foot on your home sewing machine because you're still just going right left to the side you're not turning that quilt constantly which is super challenging to do all right well i hope you've been enjoying this series i really like uh showing you why i make the decisions i do when it comes to quilting i hope it inspires you to do some fun stuff on your own and maybe give a new skill a try i know when i found ruler work and i got the hang of ruler work like it just elevated my quilting game significantly i went from having like a few free motion stitches that i could do variations on to really being able to create some really stunning pieces and all on a hand guided without you know the aid of a computer rice quilting system so if you're looking to give it a try you're looking to really level up the way your quilts look i mean practice on something first maybe make a block of this or like a placemat or something and give it a go but i really love it i love what you can do with it and how it makes you look so much better than you actually are in real life which is what we want right we all want to look like better quilters thanks so much for following along again this pattern is called tropical grove it is available on our website shop.quiltedx anonymous.com is a pdf download if you join our sashima stephanie subscription club you get it for free it's one of the ones that's included in your membership that you can download for free along with a whole lot of others it's almost a 300 value right now that we'll send you a special coupon code for when you sign up also you get the 10 fat quarters for 29.99 plus shipping each month you get first dibs on fabric so you can get a little bit extra each month we offer what's called the finishing kits which is what you need to turn your bundle into a full quilt so you get that and additional fabric if you want to do extra borders or backing or anything like that you get first dibs on that and this month we did sell out for a couple of months we didn't we had some left for everybody else but this month like it was almost all gone before we even released it to youtube and before we released it to our email list our subscribers bought up almost everything we have there may be tiny little bits left when we post this video but probably not a whole lot so make sure that you sign up for a waitlist because we are going to try to get a little bit more so we can do some more full kits of this so sign up for that but the best way to make sure you don't miss out is to join the club because then you get the fabric before everybody else you get first dibs on getting more and then you don't have to be worried about not being able to get the really cool project that you see on youtube and be able to make it this way because it's gone so too bad so sad but we don't want you to be too bad so sad we want you to have the pretty fabric plus what we do is you know it's all together it's all coordinated so you don't have to worry about does this fabric match this fabric when you're stopping online that can be a little hard and also we give you an idea of what to do with it because don't we all have that fat quarter sitting in our stash we're like i love it what the heck am i ever going to do with it well we give you that idea i sit down and i come up with a pattern that really makes that fabric shine in this case we took advantage of the colors that fade really nicely one into another and i created this fabric uh design the quilt design to help show that off and really have a lot of fun with with the design and everything to go with it so then you get the quilting video and the interview with the designer so you get to know them a little better and that's coming a little later this week all right well thank you so much for following along go check out the pattern the subscription club all over at shop.quilt astronomers.com make sure you like and subscribe to our channel so that way you don't miss any videos and also make sure you head over to our website and sign up for emails because you get 10 off your first purchase and who doesn't want to save a little money on fabric all right well that is it for now we'll be back in a couple of days with an interview with sarah gordon who designed this lovely collection and until then happy quilting [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Quilt Addicts Anonymous

Views: 8,055

Keywords: rulerwork, rulerwork tutorial, Stephanie Soebbing, longarm quilting, fat quarter quilt pattern, fat quarter friendly, fat quarter friendly quilt pattern, Stashin' with Stephanie, Quilt Addicts Anonymous, Quilt Addicts Anonymous tutorial, Quilt Addicts Anonymous tutorials, quilting tutorial, rulerwork quilting, Sarah Gordon, Sarah Gordon Forage

Id: mwXvI0bP0qg

Length: 36min 1sec (2161 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021