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Westalee Design Sew Steady Starter Kit - Humble beginnings

 I got the Westalee Design Sew Steady Starter Kit for my birthday with an Amazon gift card. It comes with a simple straight/curve ruler and a ruler foot.

It was a little difficult to find the right set because I wanted it for my Singer Rocketeer that needs a Singer slant shank. There was one listing so I ordered it. I was happy to see pictures of my Rocketeer's cousin in the leaflet that came with the set.  You have to get the right foot for your machine. 

Fortunately, Angela Walters has videos on ruler quilting, you can find them here. I got the foot adjusted correctly and went for it reusing a piece of previously quilted fabric. 

I drew on a 6.5 inch square. I went straight for the awesome looking one and skipped the straight lines except for the border outline. I hope you can tell from the free motion quilting in the light green that I already have some skill at that, that's why I jumped to the fun stuff.

This is another 6.5 inch drawn square. I skipped the border outline this time and just went for this nice pattern. Curves are harder. I ran out of bobbin thread and stopped because it was already late at night. I definitely recommend doing the border.

I thought the first one would look nicer closer together. So I drew out a 5 inch square, changed my thread, same manufacturer different color, and put on an official quilting needle (only had a normal sharp on before). Ugh, everything changed! I couldn't get the bobbin thread to catch, the screw came loose on the foot so I had to readjust and finally I had to lessen the needle tension. I finally got it to catch and did the free motion quilting at the top badly. 

 

I had so many problems with the thread not catching I went back to the sharp needle and it worked better. Quilting the closer lines was a bit harder and I got tired of it and just did random mess in the middle.

 This is not pretty at all but it gives me an idea of what I can do. I'm probably going to focus on the straight lines for now.

Happy Quilting!


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The quilt with two names

I've known about this quilt forever. I originally read about it on the Quilting Board way before I'd seen the Jelly Roll Race or the 1600 inch quilt. You can find the original post here: http://www.quiltingboard.com/tutorials-f10/super-fast-jelly-roll-quilt-t44258.html   I recommend you wade through it because there are a lot of nice examples. On page 7 is a picture tutorial and somewhere in there is a discussion of making different sizes and using different widths. She used to have a PDF printout for free but you could just print the first page.  Anyways, I used my JoAnn's, 20 strip jelly roll to try this out.  I wanted to also separate the strips by piecing squares in between them. I really like that look for this quilt so I chose a crazy scrap I had laying around and cut twenty 2 1/2 inch squares. The jelly roll had only ten different fabrics, 2 strips of each, so I pieced squares on one end of each strip. I should clarify, you need to piece strips of