Arcs, Curves & Points With Rulers Week 1

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well and staying warm and healthy! We're on the edge of the cold weather so have missed most of it, but have had a few days of cold with a little bit of snow. But it sounds like it's supposed to warm up again this week. As usual, I'll keep hoping for more snow!

Last week was the first week of Angela Walters' Arcs, Curves & Points with Rulers Quilt Along (QAL). The first video came out on Tuesday and I got right to work.

Arcs, Curves & Points - Week 1

I really like the look of the center motif, but don't like the build-up of thread in the middle that it causes. Here's an earlier photo that shows the center motif better:

Arcs, Curves & Points - Early Progress

I like to use an air-soluble marker to mark lines to help me with my quilting. For example, I marked a line across the widest part of each of the white sections so I could easily tell where to change direction in my quilting. I'm not very good at eyeballing this type of thing while quilting and am really bothered when things like that don't line up, so this is a quick and easy solution. And the markings go away on their own so I don't have to worry about getting rid of them when I'm done. If you look at the first picture, you can see that the markings are all gone now.

Arcs, Curves & Points - Helpful Markings

You can also see in this photo the swirl hook design in the red areas. This is a free motion design that Angela uses a lot. I've only practiced it a few times in the past. I knew I was terrible at making the swirl hooks but wanted to practice them a bit. Since I knew they would be bad (by bad I mean very inconsistent), I used red thread for this part of the quilting. This allows you to get the texture, but not see the inconsistency unless you are really looking for it. One of the difficulties I had with the panel is that the line between the "patches" got subtle in some places. This was especially true between the white and pink areas.

Arcs, Curves & Points - Subtle "Seams"

You can really see that in this picture. I was lining the ruler up with what I thought was the line between the two areas. Halfway across, I got confused about where the line actually was and ended up shifting the ruler and creating a jog in the quilting line. I'm trying to be more mindful now about checking the end points of the seams when lining up my ruler since those seem to be better defined. Finally, since this is a QAL about using rulers, I thought I'd share the rulers that I'm using. Angela has suggested three of her rulers for this QAL, although she emphasizes that you can use any rulers that you like and demonstrates other rulers in her video.

Arcs, Curves & Points - Suggested Rulers

I purchased her suggested rulers to both try them out and to support the free videos. These are the rulers that I've used so far:

Arcs, Curves & Points - Rulers I've Used

The curved ruler that Angela suggests (Smiley) has nice curves and is easy to use. It fits in my hand well and is easy to move around. I used the curved Quilters Select ruler because I wanted a tighter curve for one area of the quilt. I like the Quilters Select straight edge ruler better than using Angela's Dot ruler (the diamond-shaped ruler) because the shape is better for my hand and I have an easier time keeping it in place. The advantage of the Dot ruler is that the angle on the side of the ruler allows you to reposition it more quickly when doing short connected straight lines. One of the things that I really like about the Quilters Select rulers is the coating that they put on the backs of the rulers that really helps keep them in place while quilting. Angela's rulers do have a rough texture around all of the edges of the back of the ruler to help keep them in place.

Arcs, Curves & Points - Rough Texture on Angela's Rulers

I am impressed with this edging. It keeps the ruler in place pretty well, just not as well as the Quilters Select coating, at least for me.

This week the guild had their outreach sew day. We used to have a separate meeting for the Quilts of Valor (QOV) group. But since we've changed our guild's meeting venue this year, we now have all of the outreach sew groups meeting together on the same day. I think this will be nice since the QOV group can still work together on our projects, but we can also help with other projects when our group leader is busy or out of town. This week we worked on sewing churn dash blocks, using the smaller 16-patch blocks we made last year as the centers.

QOV Blocks

I made several blocks with the group, then took several home to finish up. Our group leader is going to use these blocks to make quilt tops with panels.

I also did some marathon knitting this week. I really wanted to finish my Platy Shawl designed by Laura Nelkin.

Platy Shawl

I love the colors of this shawl, although the shape is a little weird.

Platy Shawl - Close Up

I ended up adding a pair of rounds before the bind off to get a little more of the yellow color.

I also finished my Thrumola designed by Laura Nelkin. 

Thrumola - Front View

Thrumola - Side View

This was a very quick knit! The hardest part for me was identifying the stitch in the previous row that I needed for placing the thrum. This yarn is so fluffy that the stitches were hard to find and some of my thrums cover two stitches instead of one. But I'm the only one who will notice that! This headband fits perfectly and will be really nice in the cold weather!

Finally, I made a little more progress on my Lemme Hat designed by Laura Nelkin. 

Lemme Hat

It's nice going back to this project because the yarn is so easy to knit! I should make more progress on this project this week, but also need to decide on some other Laura Nelkin projects to work on for the first quarter knit-along.

Nancy