Perfect Piecing and Ruler Quilting

Published: Wed, 08/26/15

Hi ,

One of my favorite books to read to my son is called "How Full is Your Bucket?" In the book, a little boy realizes he has an imaginary bucket that is filled when he receives compliments, but dipped when his feelings get hurt.

This past week my bucket was filled to the brim with the sweetest note in our Facebook group about one of my books:

I just read Leah's e-book "Stitch It Up a Notch : How to Piece Perfect Quilts" and I was so impressed with the depth of information in this 120+ page book!

I learned everything I always wanted to know about piecing and was afraid to ask! I have not found any books out there that offer so much useful advice! I highly recommend!! - Bonnie B.

What a super review! This book took several months to write last summer because I wanted to pack it with EVERYTHING I could about precision piecing. It was a difficult process, but it's reviews like this one from Bonnie that make me so happy I stuck with the project and finished it.

If you'd like to learn more about piecing accurately with matching seams and perfect points, definitely check out How to Piece Perfect Quilts - on sale this week for 20% off!

New Ruler Quilting Class on Craftsy

At MQX this year I saw so many awesome longarm rulers and found many companies that are bringing ruler quilting to home sewing machines. Of course I brought home a ton of rulers to play with, but how do I use them?

Thankfully Craftsy is on the ball and has found the best ruler work teacher, Amy Johnson, to create a new class: Quilting with Rulers on a Home Machine. What an awesome class! It just launched yesterday and already I understand this new world of quilting so much better!

We have a fun interview with Amy this week so you can learn about her and get introduced to ruler quilting on home machines.

Here is one question I asked Amy:

What made you want to use longarm rulers on a domestic machine?

Having been a fan of traditional hand quilting designs, and seeing these designs recreated by longarmers with the aid of rulers, I wanted to try it with my sewing machine.

I loved how crosshatching, swags, and other line-based designs combined with feathers and fillers for a beautiful effect but I hated doing a lot of measuring and marking in order to create similar designs on my sewing machine with a walking foot or regular free motion quilting.

Ruler work allows such great design opportunities. First of all, it makes straight lines incredibly straight and curves are nice and smooth. It helps give a quilt structure and ‘resting places’ for the eyes. Ruler work also yields beautiful designs without necessarily being as dense as a lot of jawdropping free motion work.

Click here to read the rest of the interview with Amy Johnson

Free Motion Design #450 - Hot Path

We have a brand new free motion filler design for you this week called Hot Path, and it's our 450th design in the Project!

Hot Path is an Edge to Center design, which makes it perfect for narrow spaces. I decided to stitch it into a long, skinny rectangle similar to sashing, but you could easily use it in blocks or borders too.

Click here to learn how to quilt Hot Path.

Wholecloth Workshop Coming Soon!

Do you remember the Heart & Feather Wholecloth Quilt? This was a fun project I designed for our first quilt along in 2012.

Recently I decided to update this simple pattern and turn it into a full scale video workshop, complete with instructions on trapunto, dense filler quilting, blocking, and binding.

I've been working hard at this new workshop and it's NEARLY finished! Keep your eyes peeled for next weeks newsletter as we're launching this new workshop, plus fabric kits on September 1st!

So that's it for this week. Don't forget to take advantage of our download sale and save 20% on How to Piece Perfect Quilts this week only!

Let's go quilt,

Leah Day