Hello dear readers and quilting friends, I think I and my kids are recovering from our winter cold, flu, plague, pink eye (yes, pink eye. Thanks kids.) mess. I figure I better post something here on my slightly neglected blog before y'all forget about me.
You know how passionate I am for free motion quilting with rulers. So when I heard that Janome Canada did not recommend the ruler foot be used on the Janome S7, MC12000, and MC15000 I wanted to figure out why. I'm pretty sure I have sold the Janome ruler foot combination to owners of these machines and haven't had anyone come back with problems, so what was going on?
Since I work in a Janome dealership, I had access to the S7 and shot a video with my new iPad mini. The mini made editing my video a lot easier than I have been doing it before, so hopefully I will do more videos as soon as I get a camera mount for it.
Watch the video first, but the main issue is the ease of which the presser foot can be raised because these machines have an automatic/electronic presser foot lifter system. It's still an aspect of the lack of clearance between the top of the thick edge of the ruler foot and the bottom of the needle clamp. As always, with any ruler foot, make sure the foot is down when the needle is down and conversely, don't raise the foot when the needle is down.
With this electric lift, it's very easy to accidentally fail to follow this cardinal rule of ruler foot use. Janome Canada says they will not cover any damage to these machines (S7, 12000, and 15000) if you use the ruler foot on it. (I haven't heard anything from Janome America.) I believe the damage would be that of throwing the machine out of time, but I am not entirely certain. This isn't a huge issue to fix, but we don't want to take the machine to the shop.
I think it's doable to use the ruler foot with these machines but that's a risk you've got to decide to take for yourself. I wouldn't want you to do anything to needlessly risk your machine.
My ruler work blog linky party is still open and we've had some incredible work shared through it, so go visit the participants and if you've got a post to share on ruler work, now's the time to do it!
I hope you all had a lovely weekend and hopefully got some stitching in. As soon as I started stitching, I saw I would be doing some ripping. Bummer. The navy thread is just too dark on this blue. I just have to finish up these blue triangle in my big block baby quilt with a little ruler work and fills. Then it will be ready to bind and mail off to my sister.
Here's a pic as I audition threads. Clearly I need more darker blue thread. Really, you can never have enough thread of any color!
I also wanted to announce our Craftsy Instructors' Blog Hop that starts today, first stop with Jackie Kunkel of Canton Village Quilt Works. She's a talented instructor of paper piecing and she'll tell you about her class Paper Piecing the Quiltworx Dresden Plate.
There's a giveaway associated with this blog hop through Craftsy, and I will be running my own giveaway with my post on Tuesday! Craftsy will be pulling 10 names from those who use this link: Blog Hop Giveaway to buy any of the classes in the blog hop and the winners will get a free class!
Finally! The farm quilt is done! Whew, I loved doing it, but it seemed to take forever and life conspired to give me only little bits of time to work on it.
Binding done and time for a bath. Special note: If you use Fons and Porter's white mechanical pencil on dark fabric and then the fabric gets darker when wet, the white will get very bright and act like it will never go away......But it does. Don't freak out. Ahem.
Time to assemble the foam board so the quilt can dry flat. This 6ft.x8ft. piece takes up nearly the entire room!
I have been showing shots of this in progress for a while and have been accused of being a tease with it. It's featured in a few of my free motion quilting videos too. It lays so nice and flat, square. It was a challenge to not over quilt this quilt as it was just so fun to do, but it is destined for a bed and no one wants a stiff quilt on their bed.
I don't have a big enough area to get a good square, full view shot of the quilt without moving my entire bed out of my room. (Doesn't everybody have a huge design wall behind their headboard?) So I took the best pics I could while up on the staircase overlooking the table.
I am super pleased with how this quilt turned out. My friend wanted "something farm themed but not cutesy". I think I will do another quilt in a similar silhouette style someday, but definitely smaller!
My little sparrow. I quilted bigger swirls around the branches of the tree to give a nod to foliage, not just bare branches.
Two shots of the back.
Finally, a closer shot of the ruler work. I love how this has turned out! I am so happy to have figured out I could use the ruler toe for use with the Janome 1600P in a frame system could be used on my Janome 6600 for regular sit down free motion quilting on my sewing machine. I am thrilled to be able to share the technique here with so many wonderful quilters! If you're new here, click to find more about using long arm rulers for free motion quilting on a domestic machine.
Some stats:
72x72 inches.
Machine appliqued
My own design, but inspired by some illustrations in some of my kids' early reader books.
A commissioned quilt so I don't get to keep it.
Made and quilted on my Janome 6600.
Hobb's 80/20 batting
To top it off, it's finished just in the nick of time for the Blogger's Quilt Festival where I'm entering it in the home machine quilted category. Maybe somebody will like it enough to nominate it for a viewer's choice award? Maybe a few votes? Hmmmm...what is the etiquette for these voting things? I dunno. But I do know that if you'd like to see some fabulous quilts, head over to the festival for links to a ton of great quilts and blogs. You might even want to enter one of your own! Plus there's some great giveaways.
I thought for week 3 of our Free Motion Monday Quilting Adventure featuring ruler work, I'd focus on a few different designs and show how rulers can be used on pieced areas.
I grabbed a sample piece left over from one of my classes to play on and marked off some different lines and shapes. I used a great stencil from www.quiltingstencils.com. One half has lines spaced one inch apart while the other has a radiating set of lines for marking the center, sides, and corners of a square. If you like this stencil, it will be an important part of June's Free Motion Monday series, when we focus on grid based designs and have a giveaway of a few stencils like these!
First I did a simple diamond border or sashing design:
Then I filled in the sides of the design to make the center diamonds pop! I had referred to this design last week. Any dense fill could be used.
I made a few registration marks and then dressed up those diamonds! After that, I moved onto a sashiko-type design or pumpkin seed design using a circular shape over these two inch squares. I used the smallest Fine Line half circle. At 3.5 inches, it is perfect for making a 4 inch circle.
I started by doing a full circle with the half-circle template, flipping it over for the other side of the circle. But I found this to be unwieldy, as the ruler needed to rotate so much around the foot. Since this is a small sample piece, I could have rotated the piece around more so the ruler wouldn't need to move around the foot so much, but knowing that isn't an option when working on a bigger piece, I didn't do that. Instead, I used the etched cross-hair markings to line up with the lines that created my squares and did the quarter circle arcs across the squares corner to corner, moving from square to square.
I think that this design demonstrates that there's definitely a difference between the designs that are better suited to ruler work on a domestic machine and those on a long arm quilting system. With more clearance around the foot and visibility, the sit-down long arms might be able to handle a circular template easier than a sewing machine. For this reason, I will definitely say I don't really recommend a full circle ruler or even the half-ellipse if the thought is you'll use the full shape to stitch around in one motion. Smaller circle sets might still be good for arcs though.
Next I used the same half circle template to stitch continuous curves (CC) along the sides of these 2 inch squares. I could have used the smallest size of continuous curve ruler I have from Accents in Design for this too. This is a great design for areas with lots of squares.
Then I moved on to straight crosshatching around this flower applique. I thought it would be good to show how to stitch crosshatching around an applique since it's such a great traditional fill around applique. I shot a (long) video of this:
Here's the finished crosshatching.
Finally, I did some curved crosshatching. I am loving curved crosshatching and did this sample with the 10 inch continuous curve ruler. I did a variation on the CCX too, which was a first for me.
I an really enjoying the challenge of working on these designs with and for you. I know many of you now have rulers and ruler toes (or an alternative for your machine) so I hope to see some of your work too!
Several folks have asked for which 2 rulers I would recommend if you could only get 2 and I'd say the 8 inch straight ruler and the 10 inch continuous curve ruler.
I am so sorry to not have some ruler toe alternatives for some brands of machines. I'm a Janome girl and my experience is very limited with other machines. That being said, you can still use your free motion foot for ruler work with great care, and in the meantime, if none of my alternatives given in last weeks post work for you, contact your dealers and make sure they know that there's a demand for such a toe!
If you've missed any of the Free Motion Monday posts, you can find them on the Free Motion Mondays page.
Here's the guidelines for the link party:
For the linky this week, link up a post of ruler work you've done, if any. If you haven't done any, feel free to use a ruler to draw out any line based designs that you'd like to explore. You can use rotary cutting rulers for drawing. If you've written a post about wanting to do these types of designs, you can post that too!
Some quick rules:
Keep your post relevant to this quilt along please. Spammy posts will be deleted.
Make sure you link up to the individual post, not your home page as nobody wants to have to search around for the post if they're a little late to the party.
Reciprocate! Link back to this post somewhere in your post. You've got to dance with the one who took you to the party, so make sure you link back.
Don't be a wall-flower. (Talking to myself here too. In person I am so stinking shy!) Visit the other links, be sociable, and leave comments.
Please make sure you leave me a way to contact you if you are a no-reply commenter, especially if you ask a question.
Don't forget to bookmark this blog, follow, or sign it up in your favorite feed reader. Like the facebook page (I do post some short things on it pretty regularly), or even check out my Pinterest boards. I've even got a pin board for quilting with rulers. I'll be visiting you too!
It's time to link up once again and show how our McTavishing is improving. I am certain that everyone here has been learning more about free motion quilting and this design during this series, including me!
Saturday, I got a little ahead of myself and posted some videos of McTavishing Fun. One of them was an insanely fast time lapse video that still makes me giggle! If only I could quilt that fast in real life!
The regular speed video of some McTavishing practice is below:
I did some quilting with light peach colored thread on white fabric. I
wanted it to be a little closer to matching thread and still visible to
viewers on the video and in the still photos. McTavishing, says Karen
McTavish, looks best in a thin, matching thread.
I think one of the most important tips for McTavishing is knowing when you are backtracking or bouncing as illustrated below:
I've been working on my Glide sampler of McTavishing:
I think this bit is my favorite so far! I love the swooshiness! That's a word, right? Swooshiness!
Above, the arrow points at a tension issue. My top tension is just a smidge too tight and it's pulling the bottom thread up to the top, especially at points. The points magnify this tension issue, because the change in speed and direction of my hands affect the tension just enough to cause increased tension at those points. I also might have paused too long at that point.
I switched to Glide color Military Gold for the next section. I was excited to get this color as I had heard some longarm quilters mention that this color was a good substitute for metallic gold thread without the fiddliness of metallic thread.
The picture above, I had run out a foundation line of serious swooshiness. Wonder Woman! Wonder Woman hair, that is! One of the phrases Karen uses to describe these curves. Alas, these curves really need some extra speed to whip them out nice and smooth without the stitch length getting too long. The arrow points to where my machine was too slow for my hands.
I love how my "C's" are getting better and I also like this "S" curve thing I have going on at the left of the above picture.
I shot this picture with the flash to show the sheen of these Glide threads. Not too much, not too little!
Technically we still have one more week of McTavishing Monday, since there were 5 Mondays this month. You will still be able to link up your McTavishing work if you have some next week, but I will be doing a summary then and announcing the winners of the Glide thread giveaway.
I've enjoyed this quilt-along link party very much. It's been a challenge to get these up on Monday, but a good motivator. I will continue to do this linky every Monday, but I need your help to decide the next design!
It's important for you to realize that I don't consider myself an expert. I like working on improving my skills as much as I like teaching and sharing what I do know. I am a pretty good quilter and I'm not fishing for compliments. But I'm learning as I go too!
I'd love to do more ruler work as a linky, but that leaves some folks out as there are issues with getting a ruler toe for some brands of machines. So that's out for now.
Maybe an informal feather filler? Big swags of free form feathers? (I am not offering to lead with formal feathers as I am not comfortable with creating really uniform feathers. Somebody else can teach that much better than I!) Feather flowers? A swirly, spirally design?
Or maybe a few grid based designs?
I have a few more grid designs too, but no pictures handy.
Let me know in the comments! This is the last chance to link up or leave a comment on this series before I draw names for the Glide Thread Giveaway! (Sorry, you've got to live in the US so my shipping cost is affordable.)
