The Stripology Squared Ruler Rocks!

I am a scrap quilter.  That has already been well established.  As such, I'm generally not easily persuaded to buy specialty rulers for cutting this, that and the other, unless I can clearly see a benefit to doing so.  Part of it is not wanting to add more clutter to my sewing room when I don't use said specialty ruler as has happened in the past, nor do I want to waste money on something I don't use when said money could be used to buy fabric :-).  So it takes A LOT to get me to purchase a new type of ruler other than my tried and true Omnigrids that I have in various sizes.  I have considered getting a die cutter, briefly, at various points in my quilting career, to make cutting my scraps down to usable sizes faster and easier.  I have never been able to justify the cost or the space required, so thus far I have continued cutting down my scraps the old fashioned way (i.e. with whichever Omnigrid ruler worked best. Enter the Stripology Squared Ruler.  This ruler is the successor to the original Stripology Ruler.  I was able to resist the original ruler based on my quilting friends' reviews that it wasn't long enough for cutting longer pieces of fabric.  That problem has been solved with the Stripology Squared Ruler.  I was still on the fence about it until Gudren Erla, the designer of the ruler, sent one to Bonnie Hunter of Quiltville for her birthday.  Bonnie is a scrap quilter extraordinaire and when she used her ruler to cut down her scraps into strips for the quilt she was working on, I was sold.

My ruler arrived last week and while there were instructions included noting all of the different things you could do with the ruler, my focus was on cutting down my scraps and cutting my strips for my Perkiomen Daydreams quilt in progress so I just dove in without reading them lol.  I had quite a pile of my own scraps and gifted scraps to be dealt with so I started with those.  I'm trying to turn over a new leaf and deal with scraps as they come rather than storing them in boxes of  "Scraps to be Cut Down", of which there are currently 3 or 4 crammed full.  Oy.  No need to add to THAT backlog, so off I go with my new ruler.  While I couldn't use the ruler for all of the scraps to be cut down, boy did it make short work of the pieces to be cut into strips.  So far, so good. 

Scraps before pressing:

Pressed and ready to be cut into useful shapes, or kept as is (i.e. I keep a box of just triangles that work great for the corners of string blocks or for paper piecing triangle shapes as well as boxes of "crumbs" for paper piecing or crumb blocks).

Trimmed scraps.  The ruler is designed with markings for easy cutting of 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 inch strips, but you can cut pretty much any width strip you need as the ruler has cutting openings every half inch.  You just have to make sure that you count correctly :-).

Next I put the ruler to work cutting more of the bazillion strips that I need for Perkiomen Daydreams.  I want as much variety as possible and I want this quilt to be a scrapbook of fabrics I carried in the shop, so that involves lots and lots of strip cutting of lots and lots of different fabrics.  I stack the fabrics three at a time with pieces that are approximately the same width and I put the widest at the bottom and the narrowest on the top.  Clean up one edge, cut as many strips as you can from the stack and wa la, beautifully cut strips in a fraction of the time.

The biggest bonus so far having purchased this ruler is using it to subcut all of the strip sets I need for Perkiomen Daydreams.  Due to the long length of the ruler, I can easily cut two sets at a time.  This has saved me SO much time!  I will definitely pull out my Stripology Squared Ruler anytime I need to do a major amount of subcutting of strips or strip sets.

So in conclusion, this ruler is a bit spendy compared to other rulers out there, but the quality is great, it's made by Creative Grids so it has grippers automatically built in to avoid slippage, and it's a huge time saver.  The time saving aspect alone makes the cost of the ruler worth as it will pay for itself many times over since as quilters we all know that there are more quilts to make than time in the day LOL.  The larger shape makes it a challenge for shipping, but if I can figure out a way to efficiently ship the rulers, I will definitely stock them in the shop.

And here is the progress on Perkiomen Daydreams since my last post.  The blocks for rows 4 and 5 are completed, but I want to make at least one more row and then shuffle the blocks around to mix up the fabrics a bit more.