Needle hits ruler, needle breaks, ruler breaks, quilter has a bad day. The other thing that can happen: if you don’t keep the ruler flat on the table or the ruler base and keep good control of the ruler it can pop up and get between the foot and the needle. That’s a sad situation because you won’t be able to quilt til you have the machine re-timed. Then when the foot and needle come down, the needle hits the ruler, causing the needle to break and possibly the ruler to break and possibly the machine’s timing to be thrown out of whack. When you quilt on a Handi Quilter machine you’ll notice the foot raises and lowers as the machine forms stitches, that’s why they call it a hopping foot! When the foot raises up, if the ruler was thin it could slide under the foot. There’s a good reason machine quilting rulers are thicker. Without Handi Grip the ruler will slide over the fabric quite easily and we don’t want that to happen, the fabric and ruler need to move together. Handi Grip is ESSENTIAL for stationary machine quilting. You will move the fabric and the ruler together and guide the edge of the ruler along the foot. When doing ruler work on a stationary machine, it’s a whole different story. It’s a balancing act that takes approximately 3.14 seconds before you get the hang of it. Then you press down hard enough to keep the ruler from slipping as you glide the hopping foot along the edge of the ruler, but not so hard that you cannot move the machine. On a movable machine, you position the ruler where you want to quilt your line, keeping in mind that the needle will be 1/4 inch away from the edge of the ruler. MB: If you are a movable machine quilter Handi Grip is a good tool to help keep your rulers from slipping as you quilt. I added small pieces of Handi Grip on the back to help my VersaTool stay put. It does need to be a ruler made for this purpose, not one of your rotary rulers! Machine quilting rulers are much thicker. The Handi VersaTool proved to be exactly what I needed, but any straight-edge ruler for machine quilting will make straight lines. MB: This is where I could say, “I told you so!” 🙂 but I won’t. “I find machine quilting to be challenging enough,” I thought, “why make it even more difficult?” I couldn’t have been more wrong. Now you should know that I have resisted “ruler work” forever because honestly it just sounded like one more thing to manage. I decided to quilt straight lines inside the petals by using rulers designed for machine quilting. It looked like scribbling, and not in a good way. I tried something that did not work when I quilted a flower with rounded petals. I love how adventurous Diane is in her quilting and this time she gave ruler work a try. She is having a great time learning to longarm quilt and her quilts are so much fun! I love her bright colors and improvisational piecing. If you’d like to read the entire post (you’ll be glad you did!) you can find it here. Have you been following along with me and Diane as she jumps into learning her HQ Capri? This week I’m going to take a small part of Diane’s post to comment on.
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