Free Motion Quilting: Ruler Work on a Bernina 1230

Making a Blanket of Love for RPA Hospital's Newborn Intensive Care Unit is the perfect way to try out a new piecing or quilting technique. My latest finish, Hello Little Sailor, had plenty of both, and was quite a challenge.

My quiltmaking Wish List has, for a long time, included a plan to tackle the making of a Double Wedding Ring quilt, but frankly it's just been in my dreams. 

Enter those clever Sew Kind of Wonderful girls, with their Quick Curve Ruler and Metro Rings pattern. It's a Double Wedding Ring style quilt 'for dummies', so it was perfect for this one!

A single Metro Rings block, with a small border, was large enough for a baby quilt, and a Moda jelly roll of the "Celebration" range made it perfect for a baby boy.

I have a great deal to learn about using the Quick Curve Ruler ruler accurately, but this little quilt is all about overall effect!

Next I tackled the quilting.

I've shared glimpses of my domestic machine quilting progress on Instagram, and I know enquiring minds would like to know how I did this, so here are the tools I used.

The QCR Sidekick, companion to the Quick Curve Ruler, was designed for longarmers, but with a little practice I found it easy to create curved cross hatching, and unmarked straight lines. 

For the last 6 months I've been experimenting with using quilting rulers on both my domestic, sit-down machines, a 10 year old Elna 6004 and a 20 year old (at least) Bernina 1230, and if you want to do this a ruler foot is essential. 

Amy of Amy's Free Motion Quilting Adventures has been a wonderful source of technical information.

This is what works for me. To set myself up on the Elna initially I bought the Janome Convertible Free Motion Quilting Foot Set.

The 1/4 inch ruler foot that comes with the Janome Free Motion Frame Quilting Feet Set for 1600P is going to be your friend for ruler work.

(There's also a rather nice little open toe quilting foot.)

Either of these feet screws onto the convertible unit with a tiny screw at the rear. Then this entire unit screws onto the shank of the machine like many other feet do.

So, in summary, this is the set-up for free motion quilting on my Elna, using the ruler foot for ruler work.

Sometimes, though, I like to use my Bernina 1230, and once I've screwed on the #75 Low shank adaptor to the Janome set above it just latches on to the machine in the usual way Bernina feet do.

This is the combo for ruler work on my Bernina 1230.

So in this way I can easily move between sewing machines using the same quilting feet.

I used my Bernina very happily for all the quilting on this little quilt, but will certainly be looking out for the Bernina ruler foot due to be released this month!

Back to the progress pics. Remember, overall effect! I have so much to learn.

After parallel quilting those scrappy sections on the top right hand arcs I later changed my mind and unpicked it all. Not a happy experience ;-(

I came up with the name, Hello Little Sailor, from the nautical favour of this cute fabric range.

This is the little label we attach to each of our Blankets of Love.

Will there be a full- sized Metro Rings quilt in my future? 

Maybe :-)

Stars

Come along, let me show you what we got up to at St Mark's Quilters today!

Di C started to quilt this amazing dinosaur kindy quilt.

Barb helped Susie to decide how to quilt this little Blanket of Love.

Sue M, Margaret and Sue W kept it simple today and left their sewing machines at home, preferring to relax with some hand stitched bindings.

Liz brought along her magnificent Japanese-style quilt, just back from longarmer Sue Rowles, and with a little help from Gail, Perdita and Gillian she squared it up and machined the binding on, all ready for some long sessions of hand stitching. 

Shhh! It's a special gift for someone.

As usual Di C earned the gold star for Best Use of Colour. Look at those glorious floral pants and co-ordinating lime green tee!

With so much creativity buzzing around the hall we soon needed a little break and some refreshments.

There were pink cup cakes!

And chocolates, a gift from the lovely staff at The Marcia.

This month it was my turn to share a new technique, and with the aid of these quilts - two of them works in progress - and the tutorial here on my blog, a couple of quilters were well on the way to completing their first Modern Hexagon Stars quilts.

Gillian spent a great deal of time carefully considering a suitable arrangement for her hexies, and you'd be amazed how many variations on a theme we came up with over the course of the day!

Di B and Gail had made a start at home. They were both up to the stage of rolling those hexie edges and stitching them down to create star shapes.

But there was one special 'star' who stole the show today.

Di B's mum, Margaret, turned 90 this week, and we celebrated with HAPPY BIRTHDAY candles and a magnificent carrot cake baked by Sue M.

Margaret has only missed one monthly workshop with St Mark's Quilters since we started 5 years ago. She brings elegance, wisdom and a wicked sense of humour to our gatherings, and she stitches a whole bunch of love into her beautiful quilts.

Take a look at the Blankets of Love photo gallery here to see the latest finishes by our other clever quilters.

And now, after that big day, I'm off to bed!

Simon's Quilt

Just a short and sweet post today to share photos of a little quilt I made late last year for a friend's baby, born at Christmas time.

Circumstances prevented me giving it to them until recently.

This was very much a practice piece for my free motion quilting on a domestic machine.

Someone commented that my feathers look like fluffy clouds

Quite appropriate, really, since the colours, to me, suggest sunshine , sea and sky.

I'm happy with that, and I think little Simon and his Mummy and Daddy might be too.

Twisting

It's always fun to try something new, so there was plenty of interest at our first St Mark's Quilters Workshop for 2015 when Di B demonstrated how to make some fun pinwheel variations using the nifty Li'l Twister ruler.

She made it look so easy.

Just a few hours of machining later she had a finished quilt top - Voila!

Gillian, another fan of the ruler, made this variation.

And here are some more she prepared earlier :-)

                                        

Others, like Perdita, chose to work on their own designs. I'm in love with the gelato colours she's using in these half square triangles :-)

 

Sophie and Susan have been away for a little while, but they've still kept busy making these kindy quilts in bright, happy fabrics.

Gail's favourite soft shades are easy to recognise in these two Blankets of Love.

We all enjoy seeing some Show and Tell from our quilters, and Gillian brought in this Advent Calendar, one of several she made for her grandchildren, complete with numbered tiny stockings into which she popped treats for each day in the lead up to Christmas.

I've already written about our latest delivery of Blankets of Love to Dahlia Brigham at the RPA Newborn Intensive Care Unit in January.

Also in January Di B also handed over a huge bundle of kindy quilts to Margie Flint from the KU Marcia Burgess kindy for autistic children, just in time for each of the new children starting at the centre to be given their own quilt to keep.

All our quilters agree that the making of these quilts is a reward in itself, so it was such a beautiful surprise when Margie gave us this pretty double package, wrapped in a silver ribbon, from the staff.

The first surprise was a metal heart decorated with a "Thank you" message to our ladies, and Susie hung it on the wall with our other treasured messages.

The second package contained a huge box of chocolates, and we're looking forward to a chocolate-sustained stitching day this month! 

Disco

I'm doing a little disco happy dance here because January's Jaybird Mini Quilt Club pattern was one I'd been waiting to try ever since I signed up with Fabric Garden. 

Once again, I love how these little beauties can all be made from the scraps in my fabric stash. Oops, what does that say about the size of my stash?!?

Disco balls, walls of flashing lights, bling and colour (lots of it!) These images danced in my head as I delved into my scrap box and cut out all the tiny pieces, in readiness for another miniquiltathon at Di B's house.

This is how they looked, laid out on the day. 

There are a lot of pieces in this mini quilt - 180 to be exact!

The back of the quilt shows how I simply ditch stitched around each lozenge shape. My plan was not to flatten the individual faceted units by covering them with too much quilting.

I loved making this little quilt, but have to admit that binding such a tiny treasure, especially those chevron patterned edges, gave me a little grief.

I looked at my finished binding for a few days, but finally I could bear it no more and I unpicked the single fold binding and replaced it with double fold.

It's still imperfect, but I can cope with it.

I don't see too many outings in this little quilt's future because it's destined to join my other Jaybird minis on my sewing room wall.

But it was rather fun to take it out for a photo shoot around my neighbourhood. 

Pegging my mini Disco quilt to the wire fence certainly attracted some attention.

- or was it perhaps my happy dancing?