Today we're sharing a tutorial on ruler quilting a baby quilt as well as a brand new design with the cool name of Night Storm. And speaking of babies, here are a couple pictures of our new family member Betty, now three weeks old!

I absolutely love my Qnique 21. The handlebar controls are simple to memorize and the 21 inch harp space gives me a huge amount of quilting space. Another advantage is some accessories like the rear handlebars are cheaper on this machine than the Qnique 21 Pro.

 

The regular price for a Qnique 21 and Continuum II Frame is $10799.90. This month the sale price is $7399.95 - that is a savings of $3399.90!

 

Difficulty Level – Beginner. Night Storm definitely looks harder than it actually is to stitch. You’ll first quilt the zigzag shape, then surround it with bouncy echoes. To expand the design, just stitch another zigzag and echo cluster. You will need to be able to hit exact points in the design, but even if you miss, I think Night Storm is complex enough to hide most mistakes.

Design Family – Stacking. The Night Storm shapes stack together to form this design. While this is a lot more complex, the basic idea is very similar to Pebbling.

Where to Quilt It? – This quilting design is time consuming so I wouldn’t advise using this as an All-Over Quilting design (unless you want to be quilting your quilt for the next 10 years!). Instead I’d use Night Storm as an accent design, possibly in the background of an art quilt or sashing of a traditional quilt. It will look best on a small scale, so this is a design that’s going to work best in small doses in small quilts.

Are you still searching for the perfect design for your next quilt? Check out the latest designs shared to our Quilting Design Library here.

This is a baby quilt I started a few years ago. When I first began quilting it on my home machine, I was just making it up as I went along. The downside with quilting without a set plan is it’s easy to make the design more intricate than you intended.

 

Anyway, this baby quilt turned out to be perfect for ruler quilting!

 

We currently have all of our quilting rulers in stock! Click Here to check out our quilting ruler collection in our online store.

I started by echo ditching around the nine patch blocks with the Slice quilting ruler and then quilted a series of straight lines to connect with another block. This created some nice angular texture, but left some open spaces in the background.

I filled in those areas with some soft curves stitched with the Mini Slide ruler. At this stage I could tell this design was going to be pretty time consuming to continue on my home machine so I folded it up to finish another day.

Shifting this baby quilt to the longarm was the best choice. I was able to see the design clearly and able to quilt it more quickly by moving the machine and using the rulers as a guide. I did have to break thread a few times, but for the most part I used travel stitching to move from one area of the quilt to another.

Once I finished quilting around the nine patch blocks, I used the Super Slide Ruler to add soft curving lines between the blocks. All told it only took another four hours of quilting to finish up the center of this baby quilt.

To close, here's a picture of the beautiful, and EASY, curves and lines you can make with our rulers.

Let's go quilt,

Leah Day