Friday, September 13, 2019

I attended a Quilting with Rulers class at the Guild today, but the adventure started quite awhile ago.

When the idea of quilting with rulers first surfaced I purchased a set of template rulers along with the ruler foot for Ruby. I used the rulers just a bit on my Celtic Crystals quilt; I wasn’t very good at it and I never put in the time to practice. So I thought a class would help.

But before the class started I had to be sure my ruler foot was right for Pearl. Turns out Ruby uses a High Shank foot and Pearl uses a Low Shank foot. So I ordered the proper foot for my class machine.

When Pat was on Texada and looking for my templates he mentioned that the bag they were in said something about high shank rulers. That got me a bit worried and I got the news today that not only is the sewing machine foot different for the high and low shank machines but the rulers are also different. There was no way I was going to put out more money for another set of rulers for a machine I wasn’t really going to use all that much for quilting.

The entire morning was filled with lectures and demos and then, after lunch, we got down to business. Some of the rulers I can use with Pearl and some I can’t. No matter. My intent is to take one ruler and learn how to use it properly and then move on to another ruler. I did a bit of playing around on a practice square this afternoon and I think I’m getting the hang of it but, like free-motion quilting, it is going to take a lot of practice.

And that is what I intend to do this weekend on Texada. I have a quilt that I’ll use my 12″ Arc ruler; I asked which of the rulers was the easiest to learn and this is the one the instructor picked. The quilt is one I planned to keep for myself so it won’t matter so much how it turns out.