Ruler Work Synthesis
This is a long post, so pull up a cup of tea and settle in.
The other day, I felt compelled to get the basted Beginner’s Choice wallhanging out to be quilted. If you will recall, this is a Laura Wheeler block that I believe was intended to be simple—a nine-patch composed of squares and half-square triangles, which would indeed make it suitable for a beginner—but somehow morphed into a much more complicated block consisting of trapezoids and chisels. I have not been able to find the simpler block anywhere, but the more complicated ( = not beginner) version appears in both Jinny Beyer’s Quilter’s Album of Patchwork Patterns and in the BlockBase program.
I made a wallhanging featuring this block using Christmas fabrics. I was mostly playing around, although this is on the “to be re-done and published” list for a future date. I can’t tell you exactly what motivated me to get it out and work on it, but clearly my brain had some itch that needed to be scratched. I know that wanting more practice with my longarm rulers factored into the decision.
One of the first things Angela Walters said in the class I took from her was that no one gets better at machine quilting without practice. (That holds true for most things.) I have worked hard at adopting a mindset that will allow me to play around with my quilted stuff without assigning super-high expectations of perfection. Angela Walters is in my head a lot:
Practice, practice, practice!
Done is better than perfect!
Every master was once a disaster!
I very much appreciated the video in which Angela shared some of her very first longarmed quilts and pointed out just how awful they were.
The last couple of months have been a journey of getting to know the Q20 and forcing myself to quilt things other than loops. But I find myself getting caught up in quilting design decisions—as if designing the actual quilt top itself wasn’t fraught with a myriad of choices—and having to fight my way through the various pieces of conflicting advice I am hearing. I said to the husband yesterday that I know why some people buy longarm machines on frames and hook them up to computers. Letting the computer quilt an edge-to-edge design is infinitely easier than custom quilting.
But I am determined to master this.
I’m going to take a short detour here. A phenomenon I saw in knitting also appears to have infected the quilting universe. I started knitting in the 1980s. Somewhere around the early 2000s, a group of younger people found the craft, but they wanted everyone to know that what they were doing was “not your grandmother’s knitting.” I found that phrase annoying and ungrateful on so many levels. It is possible to be modern and edgy without denigrating what came before you as primitive and unsophisticated (which it most certainly was not). That attitude has made itself known in quilting, too, and it has caused me no end of whiplash:
“Don’t use polyester batting—it makes your quilts look like 1980s comforters,” only to discover that most quilt designers use either two batts, one of which is polyester or wool, or a 50/50 blend of cotton and polyester. (The explanation is that they travel and hang better on display without wrinkling because of the polyester.)
“Don’t stitch in the ditch—that’s for grandmothers” only to discover that a lot of custom quilting relies heavily on stitching in the ditch.
I am juggling a whole lot of conflicting information in my head and trying to gel it into something that makes sense for me. Read that last part again. FOR ME.
I spread out the basted wallhanging and looked at it. Amanda Murphy advises to “quilt the bones” of the design first. Quilt the structural elements and the parts you want to emphasize and then go back and add embellishments. I knew I wanted the black ribbon-y pieces to stand out, so I started there.
You have to remember that I was trained by a group of Mennonite quilters, and my personal aesthetic has always been more traditional than modern. I very much like the look of quilting 1/4” from the seamline better than stitching in the ditch. I quilted inside the “star” that was formed by the black fabric ribbons:
My first thought was to do some kind of filler within the star I had just outlined. I don’t like dense quilting, though. Quilts with so much thread in them that they could stand up by themselves don’t appeal to me. That was too large an expanse to leave unquilted, however. I spent a solid couple of hours looking through Amanda Murphy’s books and watching YouTube videos and looking at my collection of longarm rulers, hoping that inspiration would strike.
A few weeks ago, I was looking at the wall of longarm rulers at the quilt store when I saw the Handi-Quilter “swag” collection. These are four rulers that can be used alone or in combination to make swag patterns. I had no idea why at the time, but I sensed that I needed those rulers, so I bought them. Lo and behold, the two largest swag rulers have cutouts in the middle that can be used for making other designs, too. (I love tools with more than one use.)
The largest swag template had this teardop cutout. I got out a sheet of paper and a pencil and started playing around. (Did anyone else have a Spirograph growing up?) If the pointed end is placed in the center of a circle, a flower forms. If the rounded end is placed in the center of a circle, a different kind of flower forms, one that reminded me of a poinsettia.
I placed these in the center of each star, which added enough quilting to satisfy me. I quilted partial flowers in the partial stars along each edge. That left just the border to be quilted. Once again, the swag templates came to the rescue:
The border wasn’t deep enough for me to use all four, but the three smallest swag templates worked perfectly. I finished off the quilting with rays of straight lines in each corner. I’ll get it bound this weekend and take a picture.
This simple wallhanging—which was made as a way to test a block—feels like a milestone to me. Ruler work and custom quilting are becoming good friends of mine. That’s a bit unexpected but certainly welcome.
I should have several finishes to show off next week, so stay tuned.