Appliqued

Hi everyone!  As I was thinking out what i was going to write here, I thought, "Happy Hump Day", and then realized that it's Thursday.  Oh well .... I thought I'd share my progress on my Applique project.

Ta da!  I now have a new appreciation for the labor that goes into applique.  I took the easy route by using a fusible product and finishing the edges with a short zigzag stitch.   This is my first experience using Steam A Seam fusible web (sheets), and although this product is very easy to manipulate (reposition pieces, etc.) I was a little disappointed that my edges looked frayed after stitching.  I experimented with both a traditional applique blanket stitch and a zigzag, finally settling on the zigzag.  I also can't mention how many times I stupidly traced my pattern onto the wrong side of the fusible web!  I bet someone has a neat trick for avoiding this like marking some colored dots on one side.  If you have a helpful tip, please let me know.

I'd love some feedback from anyone who has tried Piece O' Cake Designs' overlay method of applique.  The overlay is a print of the pattern (I traced mine onto tracing paper) in which you "overlay" on top of the pieces prior to sewing to ensure proper positioning of the pieces.  I found this to be very tedious but I wanted to give it a try.  No doubt the results are very precise, but in this case, I'm not sure how imporant that is to me.

I'm still here

Hey everyone, I'm back!  Life has been full and busy -- mainly all good, thankfully.  I have been doing a little bit of sewing, but not much.  Here's a peek at my new project.

The pattern is from the recent Fons & Porter magazine and is from Piece O' Cake Designs.  I've wanted to do an applique quilt for a long time, and this seemed an ideal project.  I'm using lightweight fusible and will machine applique the shapes to the background.  Although I have tried my hand at needle-turn applique with some small projects like this one, I decided that was a bit to challenging for me to tackle at this point.

The most difficult part so far, was selecting the background fabrics.  The Piece O' Cake quilt featured in the magazine has a very colorful background, but looks cohesive because all of the fabrics are from POC's own fabric line.  I wanted to use all fabrics from my stash and not make any unnecessary purchases, so I spent a lot of time auditioning different fabrics until finally settling on what you see here.

My kids' spring break was at the beginning of the month.  I spent a week at home on a "stay-cation".  One day I took my daughter to the park for a picnic.

We had fun hanging out on our quilt, playing Scrabble on my Kindle.

This is an old Bento box quilt made from Japanese fabric.  It usually lives on the couch, but served equally well as a picnic quilt.

The view from our quilt.

I hope everyone is enjoying their Spring!