I finally borrowed my Beth’s (Daughter in law who has a Gammill longarm on frame) collection of Gadget Girl’s quilting rulers in order to try them out for sit-down quilting. While she has a nice collection that allowed me to get a feel for their rulers, they have many more available on their site.

testing rulers from Gadget Girls
This part of this blog series has been really fun. After playing with them for a couple of days, I have several thoughts on using these rulers at sit-down longarms or domestic machines. Keeping in mind that I am very much an amateur when it comes to ruler work, I still think you may find my observations a little useful:
- Gadget Girls rulers seem really nice and heavy with good markings, but I found they needed something to stop them from slipping for sit-down machine quilting as all the other rulers I tried do. I have used sandpaper dots and on some there were already some small rectangles of spongy self-liner double taped on.
- Beth uses them on her frame mounted Gammill longarm, and most of them work just as well for me on my Bernina Q20.
- I had no problem with the bigger ones on my Q20 but found them much more difficult to use on my domestic sit-downs. Part of this is the harp length and part of this is because it is not possible to sew with the ruler behind the ruler foot as it is on my Q20. This makes it necessary to turn the quilt when using the domestics, which I don’t have to on my Q20, and that makes it more likely to have the ruler slip or jump from its location before you have completed taking full advantage of the ruler. I’m not saying it’s not possible to use these bigger rulers on the domestic, but it’s harder and would require a lot more practice.
- I did love the things you can do with some of these longer bigger rulers, especially for long or big areas. I’m sure there is a lot that could be figured out by playing with these rulers.
Ropes and swags
- She loaned me one of those rulers with the notch out that goes around the ruler foot they call a stitch guide. It is often used by frame-based longarmers for controlling stitch-in-the-ditch and stitching around appliques. I found this to be completely unusable for both my Q20 longarm sitdown and my domestic machines. It makes sense, but I had to try just to see if I was missing something.
- My favorite rulers from Beth’s collection are
- I found that the Gadget Girls circles and straight rulers and Lisa Calle’s circles and straight rulers were equally useful, though I think Lisa Calle’s straight rulers are slightly better marked for my purposes, but you might prefer Gadget Girls for yours.
Three Types of Quilting Glove Solutions
I talked about the use of quilting gloves in one of my previous posts in this series. It really helps a lot in handling the rulers, especially the larger ones. I have tried three types of solutions.
- Fons and Porter quilting gloves: These are comfortable soft gloves and they allow lots of air through the gloves so my hands don’t get too hot or uncomfortable. They move on my fingers slightly more than the Machingers, but I love these gloves and these are what I would choose if I could only have one pair of gloves. They are washable.
- Machingers: These have a different fabric feel, fit tighter and allow less air through the gloves. They hardly move on my fingers at all as I guide the quilt and rulers through. They help keep my hands going longer, because they are tighter. I use these those days when my hands are a little tired and I need to quilt long hours. I don’t find them as comfortable as Fons and Porter gloves though. These, too are washable, and that’s good because they seem to pick up more color from the fabric dyes.
- Cut off ends of rubber gloves designed for the kitchen: I tried these, because I had seen other quilters use them and they were inexpensive. I simply couldn’t keep the finger ends on some of my fingers. I have really small hands so that might be the reason. I did not like this solution, but you might.
Sew happy everyone. Take time to experiment and play at your machine. You will get the time spent back when you are making something you really want to come out right.