The End of My Stitchin’ Vacation

 

After a brief interlude of cutting applique pieces, it is time to return to my sewing machine and put in some serious time finishing the free motion quilting on “Rainy Garden Windows”. I have about 14 more of these flowers to quilt. There are 49 altogether. Fortunately, I did not have any wild ideas about finishing this in time for the fair. It would have never happened.

There is still a bit of disappearing marker remaining on this one, but it does make it easier to see the lines of stitching.

I start out by drawing a circle around the base of a large spool of thread.

Then I crosshatch the center of the flower.

That being completed, I circle around the crosshatching with an additional circle. From there, I proceed around the circle, adding the flower petals.

Another view…

A lot of work for a quilting design that will just sort of blend into the batiks.

Cutting Applique Leaves

 

After all the intense free motion quilting I have been doing lately, it feels especially good to just cut fabric. These leaves will be part of the applique that go on top of my whimsical sky background.

I first cut a template of construction paper. Then I grabbed a sheet of Lite Steam-A-Seam 2. If you haven’t tried Lite Steam-A-Seam 2, or the original Steam-A-Seam 2, you are in for a real treat. The repositionable fusible mesh is sandwiched between two layers of parchment type paper and stays sticky until you are ready to iron it down and make a permanent bond.

After tracing around my leaf template on one side of the parchment-web-parchment sandwich with a pencil, I roughly cut the leaves apart. They I laid them on the various scraps and pieces of green fabric that looked promising, pinned, then cut carefully on my pencil lines. At that point, the fabric leaves can simply stay pinned to the sandwich until you are ready to stick them to the background fabric, or you can peel off one piece of the parchment paper and stick the leaf to the fusible web. Either way works.

Once these leaves are permanently fused to the background sky, I plan on satin stitching around them. Although the stitching will essentially cover the raw edges, I always trickle a thin bead of Fray Check around the outside edges first to avoid the headaches of the inevitable “fuzzy edges”. Occasionally, I still find myself trimming a few straying threads on the edges with some tiny sharp scissors.

What we quilters will do for perfection!