Wednesday was our monthly Quilted Joy Clubhouse live online meeting. This month was all about using straight edge rulers! If you missed the livestream it’s now available to watch (or re-watch) whenever you’d like. Find it on the Quilted Joy Youtube channel!

Our main program for this month’s meeting was simple border designs you can create with a straight edge ruler. Watch the video below to see the borders I created and more!

Scratching your head wondering what the heck this Quilted Joy Clubhouse is? Click here to learn more about it!

Border Designs with Straight Edge Rulers

There seems to be a machine quilting ruler out there for just about every shape imaginable. No matter what, the ruler I reach for most is always a simple straight edge ruler. You just can't go wrong with a straight line. In the meeting we took a look at a few border designs you can accomplish with any straight edge ruler.

Before I quilted any of these designs, I tried them out on paper. My border designs worksheet I was drawing on in the video is available for free until November 5, 2019. Click here to get your download! You just pop it into your cart and check out normally to access the downloadable PDF. Then it's yours to keep and print out as many times as you'd like.

To quilt these designs I added little tick marks and registration lines to my borders that were an equal distance apart. How far you'll want to space your tick marks will depend on how skinny or wide you want your designs to be. Just remember, there's no right or wrong way! If you're really not sure, you could try marking your lines with a chalk pencil before quilting so you can see how it will look.

Julie's Big Beautiful Space

For our Lookie Loo tour we visited Julie McClannan in Nebraska. I'm so in love with her quilting studio! She's in a walk-out basement and there are lots of big windows with tons of natural light coming in. I'm also super jealous of all the customizations her husband made from her! I would have been impressed with just the thread display he made, but he also made her a pegboard display for her rulers and notions and a batting station so she can easily cut her batting. And unfortunately he doesn't have a brother available. ;) If you'd like to see more of Julie and her work, you can find her at her website quiltingbyjulie.com and on her Facebook page here.

Angela's Favorite Things

Since we were talking about border designs with straight edge rulers, it only made sense to share my favorite straight edge rulers with you! Here are my four current favorites!

The straight edge ruler I reach for varies with what I'm currently working on, but I'd say I'm using the 8" Jessica's Edge ruler the most lately. It fits really nicely in my hand. I also like that the etched lines are similar to a regular school ruler, it just works well with my brain. The Garden Lines and DeLoa's Rook rulers are great for stitch in the ditch quilting because they have little notches at the ends of the ruler for the hopping foot to rest in. Similar to Jessica's Edge, I like the smaller size of the ProMini ruler and all the reference lines.

How to Quilt the Quilt: Athina's Mama Gypsy Quilt

The part of these meetings I hear the most positive feedback from is definitely the How to Quilt the Quilt section. Athina recently shared this quilt top in the QJ Clubhouse and I was immediately drawn to it. I shouldn't be surprised though, the quilt pattern is called Mama Gypsy by the amazing Judi Madsen! By the way, if you aren't following Judi yet, I highly recommend you do. She does a lot of heavy custom quilting and her quilts are so inspiring! I have no doubt that my ideas for quilting the Mama Gypsy are completely different that Judi's, so be sure to watch the video to see how I break down the quilt and come up with a quilting plan one step at a time.

Show and Tell and Wrap Up

I like to wrap up each of the Quilted Joy Clubhouse meetings with a little show and tell of the quilts shared by our QJ Clubhouse members. I’m always in awe of the quilts our members are working on and I love cheering them on.

The Quilted Joy Clubhouse Live Meetings occur on the first Wednesday of every month at 1pm Eastern. Our next meeting will be on Wednesday November 6. During November's meeting I’ll talk about different methods for marking your quilts. If you’d like to watch live, you can find us on Facebook in the Quilted Joy Clubhouse or subscribe to the Quilted Joy Youtube channel to be notified about our videos. Don’t worry if you can’t join us live. The videos will remain available on both Facebook and Youtube afterwards so you can watch them whenever you want!

Hope to “see” you at the next live meeting!