Julia's Notion of the Month & Spotty Saturday For Children in Need

Today I'm handing over to some guest contributors to the blog, but first just a quick reminder of our Children in Need event this Friday and Saturday if you need to stock up on the favourite versatile PlainStitch basic of dots and spots!.....

Now a huge welcome to our guest blogger...Lots of you know lovely Julia from the Wendover Sewing Bee for her amazing sewing work ethic and fabulous quilts! Julia LOVES to try new gadgets and she's kindly offered to do a 'Notion Of The Month' series for the blog. 

over to Julia.......................

I'm currently working on my Farmer's Wife Quit, and have decided to make the " Norway " too as a special 18th birthday gift. I'm not the best at quilt prep, more of a cut as quickly as possible 'n sew girl, but this weekend it struck me how much it really does help to have the right tools for the job - in my case the right ruler!

The Norway Quilt is made up of 2.5 inch strips and the Farmers Wife requires a lot of drawing round tiny bits of template plastic then adding on a sometimes fiddly 1/4 inch seams!
The 2.5 inch ruler is my ruler of choice for both these projects, it makes the job sooo much easier. The beauty of the 2.5 inch ruler is simplicity, no need to squint and count the inches each time you rotary cut, just line up along the edge of your fabric and you're off! Super easy and confident that all my strips will be the same width ( late night cutting with a much wider ruler ended in disaster for me previously!).

The 2.5 inch is also perfect for making your quilt binding, 1/2 m fabric folded and job done in no time at all. The edge of the 2.5 inch ruler is cleverly frosted at the 1/4 width with a dark dotted line, so when you line up against a pencil line for example on a tiny piece of Farmers Wife , you can so easily see the 1/4 inch seam allowance and either draw or cut directly with your rotary cutter, soo much quicker than my old method and more accurate too!

I also have the Omnigrip 6.5 inch square ruler which is going to be very handy for my Farmers Wife blocks which all finish up this size in the end and for the Norway Quilt you are required to cut many 2.5 by 6.5 inch strips and this is so easy with this square ruler! So the two combined are making life a lot more straightforward, I highly recommend popping in to see Debs at PlainStitch to get yours! I now am thinking about my next purchase....a smaller rotary cutter!?