How to Quilt Crazy Curves

We’re nearing the end of the Walking Foot Quilt Along and have only a handful of designs left to quilt together. I’ve been adding a little extra quilting goodness to these quilting tutorials to teach you a bit about my new obsession: ruler foot quilting!

Click Here to find the new Basic Ruler Quilting Kit which comes with my three new rulers: Slice, Mini Slide, and Super Slide made by Grace Company!
I know it might seem confusing how ruler foot quilting and walking foot quilting are different seeing as I mostly quilted in the same direction – pushing the quilt through the front of the machine just like with walking foot quilting.

The main difference is what the machine is doing – with walking foot quilting the machine’s feed dogs are doing the work for you and pulling the quilt through the machine one stitch at a time.

Unless you take a heavy hand with the quilt and start shoving it through the machine (which can happen when you’re impatient and the walking foot is feeling a little slow!), your stitches will be the same size.

Ruler foot quilting, which is a form of free motion quilting doesn’t use the machine’s feed dogs so you can quilt in all directions, but you’ll no longer have the guaranteed consistent stitch length that you get from walking foot quilting.

So it’s a bit of a trade off, but ruler foot quilting is faster. You can speed up and so long as you can match the speed of your hands with the speed of the machine, you can move the quilt faster.

The only downside is your stitches may sometimes get bigger / smaller depending on your speed / movement ratio.

Feeling confused? It’s hard to understand the differences of these types of machine quilting until you try them! Give Crazy Curves a try this weekend and quilt half your quilt sandwich with walking foot quilting and the other half with rulers or with free motion quilting.

I promise you’ll learn a lot and have a new perspective on these different types of machine quilting!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day

LeahDay

Leah Day has been teaching online since 2009. She's the creator of the Free Motion Quilting Project, a blog filled with thousands of quilting tutorial videos. Leah has written several books including 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs, Explore Walking Foot Quilting with Leah Day, and Mally the Maker and the Queen in the Quilt.

1 Response

  1. Jerene says:

    I can't wait to try this technique. Thanks for sharing.

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