Sweet River Studios

I thought I'd go over the process of making some of the applique pieces for this quilt. I did some testing (see Part 3) and they came out really well and went fairly quickly. Let me tell you though, this process makes a ton of trash! After cutting on the 12x12" mat, you peel off the excess which is trash. Do that to interfacing and the fabric and you can see how this generates a lot of trash but the pattern pieces are getting cut and cut quickly. After scanning the images and importing them into the Silhouette software, I can place them on the 12x12" mat and have the Cameo cut out interfacing or freezer paper backed fabric. You just have to remember that if you're cutting out the fabric to enlarge your pattern piece first so you have plenty of fabric to turn under once the interfacing is ironed on. Once the interfacing was cut out, I did some test pieces by just ironing the interfacing to some fabric and cutting around the shape leaving a generous 1/4...

In the book Applique Mastery by Philippa Naylor, you're given a a template of one quarter of the quilt and it is very, very large but thankfully, the author had the foresight to include the patterns on the back pages of the book. I was able to lay the book on my copy machine and scan the pages into either a .PDF or .JPEG files. The Silhouette software only takes .jpegs. I want a lot, if not all, of the applique pieces in this quilt to have folded edges as opposed to raw edge. So that means I need to cut designs out of fusible interfacing and fabric but I need the fabric to be slightly bigger. The idea is to iron the interfacing onto the fabric and have enough fabric around the interfacing to pull over the edges making the edge look nice an neat. If you want raw edge applique pieces, it means that you can see where the fabric has been cut and the edge may fray. You would iron the interfacing onto the wrong side of the fabric first, then cut your piece out in the exact size you ne...

I've picked my fabric, which I agonized over but won't go into the sad details of that. It's just too embarrassing for me. Anyway, according to the pattern, you need 3 printed fabrics and 7 solid type fabrics. I wanted something bright and colorful so shopped online. I can see a lot more fabrics online than at my local quilt shop but I normally don't like to shop online for fabrics that I have something specifically in mind for like this quilt. I can buy random fabric and make it work for totes or bags but for this I would rather see the fabric in person. When you shop online you can't touch it and you can only HOPE the swatch they show is accurate. I really like the ruler at the bottom of the swatch below. This should show you that what you're seeing is a large square of the fabric. This one happens to be around 17x17" some are 12x12" but you get the idea. You should see some repeat in the swatch so you know that the whole pattern is being shown. ...

I found a great book called Applique Mastery by Philippa Naylor. In it, she throughly goes over her techniques for applique and her pattern for her quilt called Bird by Bird. I admit, I don't usually follow a pattern exactly unless its making a tote or bag or something and I kinda have to for it to turn out. I simply mean that where a pattern says use X color or X shape, I probably won't. I'll change little things making them more mine so by the time I'm done, I doubt my quilt will look exactly like hers. And that's okay. The quilt has a lot of applique pieces. Hence the title applique mastery. No I didn't count all the pieces but clearly there are a several hundred or more in this 74x74" quilt. If I would use a pair of scissors to cut all the interfacing pieces and fabric pieces and do it all by hand, I would be dead by the time it all got cut out let alone sewn down. So, that's where my handy Cameo Silhouette comes in. I bought one to cut ou...