Cross-Hatch Ruler

 The cross-hatch ruler was a show bonus when I bought my Innova.  The usual round deadbar is replaced with a square bar with a channel, and then there is a sliding bracket that holds a 40" ruler at various degrees.  

I needed to try it.

First thing I learned is you need lots of extra backing when trying to use both the cross-hatch ruler and red snappers.   I also learned that you can quilt closer to the takeup roller on some angles than on others, as the ruler surface rounds.   So, 45 deg was OK, 135 deg was affected by this 'rounding'.   Again, this could be solved with extra backing. 

 I wasn't doing 'traditional' cross-hatch in a block, I'll have to save that for another quilt.  Here I was doing large cross-hatching across the whole quilt as an overall design.  I did really like this ruler for that, because I could cross two 9" blocks at once, re-angle my ruler and zig-zag my way across the quilt without breaking thread.  I think it would be much harder to do this accurately with the usual shorter straight rulers (but haven't tried it, so don't know for sure).

I didn't tighten the slider every time, and I think I will look for a drop-in pin for the angle adjustments as opposed to the thumb screw that is there now (seen better in the first picture) , because I got really tired of screwing and unscrewing (plus it was really time consuming), and wound up just relying on the tiny lip to hold the correct angle.  If this were heirloom or full on custom quilting, I'd be tightening up all the attachments each time I think. 

And then I went back and meandered every other diamond...this added texture, and also took attention away from those points that didn't meet exactly.

 

and now this quilt is ready for binding.