Quilting with Rulers: Measuring, Marking, Doodling, and Design

One of the things I loved as I learned to quilt with rulers, was that it was a great way to get straight lines and curves without doing any or much marking. I hate marking. Or rather, I hate doing a bunch of precise measuring and marking.

But as my skill grew, I found I was raising the bar for myself design-wise. My fills were denser and my lines and ruler work were more intricate. That meant if I made a mistake, it was harder to rip out the stitches.

I also was teaching the technique to others and many of my students found markings to be reassuring.

So I find myself doing more marking these days. I love my air-erase purple pen. I can mark stitch lines (or ruler placement lines) and tic marks quickly and they disappear without having to wet down the entire quilt. The typical air-erase pens are too thick for me though, so I use a nice thin pointed pen. (It's available in my shop here: Fine Purple Pen)

This is especially nice when making corners around a design or seam like the center of this star block. I've gotten pretty good at judging that quarter-inch spacing or multiples thereof, along side another line or seam, but when it's time to turn a corner, I've found it was easier and faster to go ahead and mark a turning point.

Not sure of my design, so I mark it.

I'm a big fan of doodling designs too and so it was a natural to doodle on my quilts at times to work out a plan for quilting. Sometimes I do it on a big piece of plexiglass, but lately, especially if it's ruler work, I find I like doing it directly on the fabric. If I don't like what I see, I can erase it with my eraser pen! (Many thanks to Karen McTavish who mentioned an eraser pen in one of her books.)

Clean up the marks with the eraser.

I also have a combination marker with purple on one end and eraser on the other. The eraser works on the blue and purple markers and I love it. It's not just water as some think, so it actually erases and it does it fast. I do find extra marks distracting as I quilt and it's hard to see how the stitching line looks with the marks right there, so erasing is fabulous. (What about dark fabrics? Chalk pencils are wonderful!)

I still wasn't sure about this design idea so I kept marking. Marking is so much easier than ripping out stitches. Especially on a project like this ruler work sampler I've been working on for what seems like ages. It calls for more precise and geometric work than my typical quilts.

I thought 'floating' the center square looked more interesting and it made it easier to quilt continuously around it. Sometimes it's not just how the design looks but also about how it stitches out. The fewer thread tails to tie off or bits to travel stitch, the better. It would have been relatively easy to cross from one triangle to the next if I had extented the square to touch the inner star points, but it would have been harder to work the paisley design into those corners.

Maybe most 10-year-old boys reach this annoying stage, but my oldest was being a real wise guy today, "You're still working on that?! What year do you figure you'll finish?" he quipped today. I gave him the look, you know it if you're a mom. "It looks great," he quickly said.

Above, I had missed my mark, or the mark was off. Too close to bother figuring it out either way. Below, I erased the marks. Can you tell if it's off? Me neither. It stays.

See how I could work those paisleys into the areas around the inner points? If I hadn't tried drawing out the design, I probably wouldn't have thought to make it smaller.

Take advantage of the 1/4 inch markings on your rulers to develop designs too. You can offset the ruler from a center point or corner to create designs. Below, I really started playing with my design and doodling with my purple pen.

I was having a hard time deciding what to put in the sort-of 9 patch blocks. Especially as I don't want to stitch continuously across that orange with my turquoise thread.

Then there were these spots above the double star points. I like the echo around the piecing and this loopy L design. I'm really loving this L design anywhere lately as I've seen how it avoids backtracking. I need to practice it more, and marking helps me keep it in a vertical fashion instead of an Italic L!

So many ideas and I don't think I really love any of them. It's kind of an odd shaped area to fill. I could have put more paisleys in these areas, but I didn't want it too dense. And I felt like any random-ish fill ought to have the 1/4 inch echo in those L shaped corners and that was just looking too awkward. I also needed to bring some feathers into more areas of this quilt, so I feathered my star.

Not sure if I like it and haven't finished it yet, but it's a good start. Besides, I've got to make sure my son knows I can finish my projects!

If you are on Instagram, and post any pictures of work you've done with rulers, why don't you tag them with #rulerworkonadomestic so we can share design ideas? #rulerwork is good too if you're using a long arm or sit down machine.

If you missed my big flurry of excitement Friday and Saturday, you might not know that my online shop is now open at Amy's Quilting Adventures! We started off with a bang and it was amazing. I have run out of several items and they are on order, so I hope I can provide you with a great resource for both learning about ruler work, buying rulers and templates, and the supplies to make quilting easier.

If you've left one of the wonderful and encouraging, complimentary comments I've been getting here lately, know that I read them all, but I haven't been able to keep up with replying back. I'm really really thankful for them and you!

If you follow my facebook page, you'll know that I had a huge operator error with this blog Saturday. I accidentally deleted the entire "Quilting with Rulers" page! I got all the content, pictures, and links back thanks to a recent backup. But the URL is different, so any links that went to that page are sadly broken. I'm keeping an eye out for those links on my blog, but if you linked to that page or pinned pictures from it, they're land on my blog, but with an error message. Thankfully, the new "Quilting with Rulers" tab/button is easily visible on the error page. Linking to or pinning from the current page will be most helpful.

Of Quilting and Blogs

Happy Thursday dear readers! One more weekday and my family and I are taking a much deserved trip to Virginia Beach. We're going to hit the Virginia Aquarium and wade at the beach. (All the talk of sharks on the east coast and I'm happy to decide we'll stick to the shallows!) The great thing is that this short trip will be completely funded by my blogging and quilting activities.

My kids earlier in the summer

  I'm so happy to make a big deal about this with the kids because they've dealt with less than stellar meals from time to time and sometimes a cranky and busy mommy as I worked on various projects. I think it's good for them to see me work and make progress on my goals as we've had big changes since my husband's cancer a few years ago, when I had been a SAHM whose sole focus was on raising the kids and keeping up with the house and garden.

Like many 10 year-old boys, my oldest child is into Minecraft. He built a 'world' with our family in it. My 'room' has a craft table in it.

Sometimes the work of blogging takes over and pushes out the quilting that I'm supposed to be blogging about! Then there's the work I do for my local Janome dealer where I handle anything that has to do with computers and the internet, including a little social media on the shop's behalf.

I'm not making a killing, especially if I add up how much time goes into the blog itself and the writing (and I am such a slow typist), not to mention the quilting projects. I think any quilter understands that aspect of it. But it fits with my life and family and at least it's a subject that I love. The people I interact with because of the blog are absolutely wonderful! As a blogger, it's hard to earn much without selling a product or book, unless you're doing sponsored posts or have a large amount of advertisers. I've started selling a few advertising spots, but I've never done any sponsored posts or sold products or patterns. I'm excited to see how I can improve what I'm doing soon as all three kids will be going to school in two short weeks.

Sometimes there's far more blogging than quilting going on. Pardon the mess- this is real life! Oh, and I'm supposed to be standing when I work on the computer. Busted! Let's just pretend that my shirt is ballooned out in an unflattering way and that's not my tummy.

If you're a blogger, do you read Abby Glassenberg's blog, While She Naps? She's a crafter who has developed a niche of blogging about the business of craft blogging and business as well as her softie design work. She's recently provided a link to Quilting Jet Girl's recent post for quilt bloggers. It's got quite a few links and content of interest to those who are blogging about quilting.

Quilting Jet Girl is part of the 2015 New Quilt Bloggers Blog Hop, and as such there's some great tips and stories of interest offered. I wish I was a new enough quilt blogger to join in, but it's great reading. Being old enough to not have a ton of experience with computers in the workforce (My college years were pre-Windows), I'm sometimes overwhelmed by all this internet stuff! But I'm learning.

Clearly this lighting and arrangement will not work for this video.

As part of my YouTube channel, I'm finally taking the plunge and doing a video introduction of myself. It's a big stretch to show myself talking on screen after some 80 videos that pretty much show just my hands! Not to mention needing to set up my studio in a totally different manner and running back and forth from behind the camera to being the star of the show, so to speak.

That's better. Mostly.

That's part of the reason I've not been posting as much. I hope to get back into the swing of things and get some projects finished!

Working with Text Part 2

In the first part of this series, I showed you how to use Microsoft Word to make patterns for text projects. I covered how to not only get the letters or other text the font and size you want, but also how to make those huge letters in an easy to trace outline form.

It tends to be easiest to then print out the letters and use them individually, using a scaled-down version of your text document to guide the placement and spacing. If your printer can use larger paper than standard copy paper, you can use the paper size selection menu in Paint. Sometimes a sheet of legal paper is just what you need. See below.

Sometimes you want to print out your text at full size to get the full effect of the words together. If legal size won't do it, and you aren't blessed with a large format printer, this means printing on multiple sheets of standard 8.5x11 inch paper and taping the image together.

 There are several ways to do this, depending on what programs and even what printer options you have. Again, I am not an expert, and many of you may already have a better way that works for you. But here's a basic way to do it for free on a program most PC users already have. (I have another way that involves a graphics program, but that will the next part of this series.)

First make a text document that you want to print out in a large format (Above). If you made one following the steps of Part 1 of the series, open it now. Make sure it's spaced and sized how you want it. Highlight all the text and copy it with a right mouse click. Now open MS Paint. Most PCs come with this program in the Accessories folder. Paste your text selection into it. Sometimes some odd shifting happens in the copy/paste procedure.

 It's pretty easy to adjust the placement of the words by selecting the words that I want to shift and then dragging them into position. Below, I shifted the bottom line slightly to the left.

 Paint does not treat the text as vector images, so don't stretch the words much to resize. Instead use the resize option to the right of the select button for this. (Not shown) Your won't be able to specify inches or similar measurements with resizing or with Paint in general, just percent or Pixels. You have to play around with it to get it how you want it. Other programs have this feature, but again, that's for another post. It's best to get them the size you want them in the Word document before importing into Word.

 Since this method will print across several sheets of paper, I like to place a box around the phrase to help with centering the text on my project. It also helps with lining up the pages after they've been printed. (Above) The orange arrow points to the rectangle selection. Once you've clicked it, you can click and drag on the screen to make a perfect rectangle. In the upper right corner of the screen shot above is the line size button. I make it the thinnest.

Once you've got the image and text how you want them, it's time to set up the page.

Click the blue tab indicated by the orange arrow. On the drop down list, hover over the Print button as indicated by the green arrow. Don't worry, it won't start printing at this point. This brings up a sub-menu (you can also click on the little arrow to the right of the Print button. Go to Page Setup as indicated by the blue arrow. The dialog box below will pop up.

Much of this is pretty straight forward. Chose the size of paper you will be using and decide between portrait or landscape. Don't bother with margins. The bottom portion is where we will get this document nice and big.

Choose whether to center the text horizontally or vertically (orange arrow). I did both. Then click the circle by "Fit to" indicated by the green arrow. The blue arrow shows where you can now decide how many pages to print on. I entered in 2 by 2 pages. This is a fairly easy but imprecise enlargement process since we all can pretty much visualize the size of multiple sheets of standard paper. If you can't, pull out a few blank sheets and lay them out side by side to get a feel for how many pages you need. See the difference in the grey 'preview document'? Click OK.

You can preview before you print. The arrows above show you at the print menu again, but selecting 'Print preview'. I didn't get a shot of this, but Paint will show you the individual pages that it is going to print. It would be helpful if it showed all the pages at once, but it doesn't.  If you don't like what you see, go back and adjust things, resize, whatever.

Then you are ready to actually go to the print menu and hit Print! Double check and make sure your printer and Paint agree on the orientation (portrait vs. landscape)

This a previous version, without the rectangle around the words.

Then you will get your lovely large sets of letters/text. My example just happened to print each word out on it's own complete sheet of paper. That's what works best for making the  pattern, fewer pages to tape and lines to match up. But, ideally to better show you this technique, I would have had some letters cut between pages.

With Paint, you are likely to get some pixelation  of the lines. It's nothing that going over the lines with pencil or pen won't cure. Again, not ideal, but cheap and easy.

Then you tape the pages together. You can see in the image above where I cut away the margin where the box crossed from one page to another so I could tape it precisely. Sometimes it will be off a smidge and you just adjust accordingly.

So there you go. A quick and easy way to get larger phrases really big using Word and Paint. BTW, other things can be enlarged this way, not just text.

Upcoming parts of this series will be using a graphics program to enlarge words in a specific area to a particular dimension and various ways to transfer the text to your quilt.