Quilting with Rulers: Quilt Sue Shares

Many thanks to Quilt Sue for sending me a guest post about her experiences as she begins quilting with rulers. I'm up to my eyeballs in class prep and sick with the plague (or maybe just the flu) so having some help is much appreciated! 

Here's Sue:

Hello everyone. I’m thrilled to be over here at Amy’s place to tell you about the  fun I’ve been having with my quilting rulers. Firstly, a little about myself. I’m known as QuiltSue, and I blog about life over at QuiltTimes.blogspot.com. I’ve been quilting for some years now and have had a book published as well as patterns in magazines. When it comes to quilting, I use a computerized robotic long-arm system as I seem totally unable to master the art of free-motion quilting. Until...... I saw an ad for Amy’s Quilting with Rulers class on Craftsy and I was intrigued. I signed up and watched all the lessons and got very excited at the thought that this was something I might be able to do. 

Christmas was coming, so I wrote to Santa and asked him for some rulers, and I must have been very good all last year, cos he brought me some a few weeks ago. Well, I could hardly wait to get going and here are the results of my first day of playing. I know some of it is not very good, but remember, I am a beginner. Unfortunately, I can’t find a photo of my first efforts but I was enjoying myself I can tell you.

Day 2 dawned and I was off and running (or rather machining) again. In this next picture you can see what I achieved. I could not believe how easy it was to get good results using the rulers, and believe me, I was having fun. I was learning to move the quilt at the right speed to get good stitch length (most of the time) but above all I learnt not to hold the rulers to tightly cos if you’re pushing down too hard on them it’s not easy to move the quilt sandwich. I also realized that I need to draw in my boundaries for a pattern as I’m not yet very good at judging these things.

  

I had seen a design on the internet somewhere that intrigued me, so I then decided to try and re-create it, using just the straight ruler. Considering I was still only on Day 2, I don’t think it was too bad at all.

By Day 3 I was feeling ambitious, so I made myself a large sandwich and set off with a vague plan of having a central medallion with “things” around it. So I started, and after 2 days I had this. I was really happy with it, although I felt a little deflated when I proudly showed it to my husband who looked at it for a minute then said “yes dear, very nice, what’s it going to be?” At that point I counted to 101 and then explained, again, about practice, practice, practice.

 By now I was so fired up about quilting with rulers that I decided to sew four poor little orphan blocks together and play with them to see if I had any difficulties using rulers on pieced blocks with seams rather than just on wholecloth sandwiches. So, on Day 5 I started playing with the blocks and by the end of Day 7 this is what I had. When I showed this to my husband, he looked it, looked at me, thought for a minute and then said, it’s very nice dear, are you going to do anything special with it? Good to see he obviously learnt from his previous mistake isn’t it?

Now I’m feeling so happy with this whole thing that I’m about to let myself loose with a rather fun modern quilt top that I made last year. I can hardly wait to get going on it.

Thanks for reading this, and thanks too to Amy for having me and for giving me so much fun.

Thanks Sue! So nice to read about your adventures with ruler work. 

BTW, I extended the ruler work link party to March 4 so you've got plenty of time to put a post together and link up. Share your work and inspire and encourage others to give quilting with rulers a go.