Collage quilting - welcome beginners

hi linda from thistle down and company again this is another one of my video tutorials to inspire you in quilting and show you new and different techniques today's technique we are going to explore making a collage quilt i'm sure many of you are familiar with collage quilts they're very popular there's a lot of really cool patterns out there and a collage quilt will feed your artistic and playful side because there's a lot of things that you have control over and it's a lot of fun cutting out and you'll see as we go along so i think you'll really enjoy it we're going to do something very simple not too over the top this is what we're going to be doing is this open heart so what we're going to start with is you need a pattern so in this case this is our pattern and you're going to need a foundation to build your collage on the perfect foundation for collage quilts is whisper light tracer foundation it's a super lightweight foundation there is no fusible on it so there's no glue to worry about you can draw on it you can iron it you can wash it it cuts nice and clean so this is what we're going to use to build our collage foundation on that's very important so first you're going to take your foundation lay it on your pattern and then using a number two pencil you are just going to trace your pattern onto the whisper light and you don't have to be super exact with these lines because you're not going to see them we're going to be covering them up so you're going to trace the pattern tada magic there's one already traced so you can see we've traced the design okay so that's what we are going to build our collage on well what are we going to build our collage out of here comes the fun part you are going to choose a variety of large print fabrics fabrics with large and interesting motifs similar to my top this would be fun to cut up but it's a knit and we're not going to be using knits but all these fabrics have excellent motifs that you can cut to make our elements and i'll show you what i mean now if you have a stash you can choose that or just buy a collection of fat quarters i used about 10 to 11 fat quarters for the project behind you are going to take your fat quarter and you are going to take fusible wet paper backed fusible web in this case i'm using heat n bond light i also like steam seam too light your choice but you're going to take a piece of fusible web now you can just do a section of your fabric or if you want you can cut a piece of fusible and fuse the entire piece of fabric but this is a small project so i chose to just do small sections of fabric from a large variety of fabrics so you're going to pace tape your place your fusible web onto the wrong side of your fabric that's very important so we're going to go over to the iron and we are going to just press the fusible web onto the wrong side of your fabric you might be asking what's this shiny thing on my pressing mat this is a silicone pressing sheet and that is very nice to use when you're using any kind of fusible because if you get fusible on here you can just wipe it off rather than getting it on your pressing surface and then it's there to stay so silicone pressing mat is nice to have so now we have our fabric with our fusible web on the back and because i'm just using this section of it i'm going to cut it out and we can save this for another project of course so i've also done that with this fabric and i chose i know i want to cut elements from this grouping of flowers so i made sure my fusible is covering that so again i'm going to cut this section out see on this fabric if you fuse the whole thing you'd have a lot of blue space that you're not going to use so you just cut your fusibles to cover the motifs you're going to want to cut out so then you are going to get a nice small sharp scissors and you're going to begin cutting and you're going to just cut out elements that you like and because there's paper on the fusible it makes it easy to cut the fabrics it cuts nice and crisp and you can cut right along the lines of the motif that you like and then you can just cut over where you want i'm not going to cut that skinny stem move over to here and keep cutting and there's one motif and there's lots of motifs in here to choose from this next leaf is cool you don't have to do all the little tiny jiggity jaggedies but you can if you can if you want to it's up to you how precision cutting you want to get for this purpose i don't want to stay here all day so i'm going to not cut the little jiggity jaggeries okay so i'm going to cut that there's another motif and so you just keep cutting motifs out of your fabrics and you are going to end up with fabrics that look like this all kinds of raggedy pieces of fabric because you've cut all the motifs out of them and like for instance this one this was a giant flower i didn't want anything that big our collage is not that large so i just cut out the top part of that flower there it is and then i cut out another piece so anyway you're cutting your motifs out of your fabric because there's paper on the back they cut out nice and crisp if you tried to cut them out and then put fusible on it it would be a big mess you'd be very frustrated so now you have a collection of motifs so you are going to kind of arrange them by size different size motifs okay so that way when you're building your collage you need to fill a big space you can grab a large motif oh this was a the cute little chippy out of uh tula pink's fabric so now you have your motifs different sizes and there's still paper on the back you want to remove the paper so what you're going to do is take a pin and you're going to score the back of the paper with the point of the pin and it makes the paper come off nice and easy rather than trying to peel it up with your fingernail from the edge because then you're going to fray the edge and it'll get all messy so just score the back just a nice quick score fold it back and the paper comes right off so that's the easiest way to remove the paper from the fusible web now we have our whisper light our foundation that we're going to be building on that we traced from the pattern so now we need to start filling in our pattern and this motif makes a really nice bottom of the heart because it has that little point to it so you kind of search through the motifs and see what fits where we're going to fill this all in you don't want any open spaces you're going to fill the outline in completely and you're gonna layer them you need to fill in something small here that one still has paper you're just going to keep building your motif this might be a nice one for over here and you're gonna want some lights some darks you don't want them all to blend the same now this one you see when i place it this point is kind of sticking out kind of funny looking just because you've cut them out once doesn't mean you can't cut them again so if you need to make a motif a little smaller or trim it just trim it off make it fit see that's better now we don't have that funny tail sticking out there and we'll want to fill in under here so as you can see i'm covering the lines and building up in the paper score and this is i think really one of the fun parts of making a collage quilt is just playing with all the different placements of the fabrics now this is really large so again this large flower that i cut out you can cut down and you just kind of decide where you want to go you can follow one of the motifs so just because it starts out as something large doesn't mean you can't make it smaller so just play with it all it's almost like being in kindergarten again that we're not using any paste okay see so we're just going to keep continue building oh there's my iron that means it's ready for us wants to get fused so i'm going to place a couple more and like this little one here we need to fill in under here there we go okay so i'm gonna take this over to the iron and show you our next step okay now we're at our ironing surface and i have my silicone pressing mat down so that way we know we're not going to get any fusible on our ironing board because then like i said you can't get it off so i have an iron set and we have our motifs i'm not filling in the whole thing because i don't want to be here all day for you so we are going to make sure everything is like we like it make sure all the motifs you may want to put this on a small piece of cardboard or a small mat when you're carrying it over from the area you were building it on or build it here at your pressing station so when you pick it up and move it your motif stay where they are but you are simply going to now press wait i'm going to move this one over there's an empty space there we go now you're going to press and this is going to fuse all the elements in place because remember we have the fusible web on the back of our fabrics so there we are that is fusing them all in place so now our motifs are fused down to our foundation so you're going to fill in the whole thing of course but after you get the whole thing filled in and all fused down then you are going to take a nice little sharp scissors and you're going to cut away the foundation now what's nice about the whisper light is it cuts away clean and easy there aren't any threads that are going to show it really cuts away easy i'm going to just keep cutting away if your scissors is sharp enough you can almost just kind of glide along the edge and it'll cut it away and any little corners go in with your tip and get them out you're gonna keep cutting keep cutting you're gonna cut it all out okay so we're going to cut it all out on the outside we're going to keep the inside intact for just a little bit and i'll show you why okay so i'm going to cut this away a little bit there we go okay so now you can see that we have the foundation cut away from our motifs so now as you can see in the sample behind me we have love in our heart and also our motif is our collage is on a background so you need to choose your background fabric so let's move these out of the way and as far as background fabric choices you don't want something that's going to interfere too much with your collage but you also want to have an interesting background so these are a few options just to show you what they look like there's that that's kind of a sweet romantic feel this low volume map and text type print has more of a modern feel similar to the one that we have up on the wall and then this one this is just a real soft gray tone on tone so you can see a variety of backgrounds kind of changes the flavor of it but none of them are wrong so you're going to choose your background we're just going to choose this one today and we need to get love in the heart now our we're using a fat quarter so it's 18 by 22. okay we're going to cut it a little smaller but you're going to want to find the center of your fat quarter fold it in half fold it in half again and put a pin in it and unfold it there's my pin i can take a wash out marker and put it up and that will take out the pin you don't want to iron over that okay so there's our center so then this is our collage but again we need love in our heart so here's what we're going to embroider in the center is the word love and this is really a cool way to transfer designs we're going to lay this on there's still whisper light here in the center we haven't cut that out yet and we're going to center it where it looks right that looks good to me it looks good to you and then we're going to use a friction marker and a friction marker is erasable with heat and it's a nice fine point so we're going to take and we're going to trace the word onto the whisper light okay so now we have it on the whisper light foundation so now i'm going to center this on our fat quarter and if you want you can put a couple pins in well and now we're going to trace it again with the same friction marker we'll go a little darker so you'll be able to see it when you're embroidering and because the whisper light is so lightweight this is where the magic happens there's the word so that's a super easy way to transfer designs you don't have to dig out a light box or hold it up to a window it's also great for transferring designs onto darker fabrics fabrics or even wool that you can't see through so there's our word so that we'll be able to embroider that on our background so let's get our embroidery things together and then we can embroider our word wow okay now i said embroidery some of you may go oh my gosh embroidery this is super easy anyone can do it it's very simple hand embroidery and you might really find you like it it can be very relaxing so you're going to want an embroidery hoop and take the hoop apart you put the area you want to embroider in the middle take the outside of the hoop put it on and then you want to tighten it up and make sure the fabric's nice and tight in there almost there and there we go that's going to keep your fabric stabilized doesn't have to be exactly in the center this is just for our stitching now you're going to get some embroidery floss and most drop floss is sold in six strands you're going to separate you're going to cut a length of floss about 18 inches long 18 20 inches long and you're going to separate it so that you only are working with two strands so there's two strands of floss you're gonna thread a size eight embroidery needle it has a slightly larger eye so you can fit it through so the stitch we're going to be using is the outline or stem stitch and it's very easy you're going to come up a little bit before the end on the line and pull up you're going to leave a little tail on the back actually a big tail and we'll work that into our stitches to secure it so that way we don't have to have a knot on the back so you're going to go down and then we're going to come back up right by our other stitch that's going to be our first stitch okay now we are going to keep our thread to one side meaning all of our thread that we're working with is always going to say this side of the l okay so you're going to go down and then up and then down and then back up just next to the other stitch and then down and back up to the other next to the other stitch it's not at the end it's just past the end on one side of your threads and then you just keep continue stitching that is called the stem or outline stitch and it's a very good stitch to use for words because you can curve it around and it's a small stitch so you can make all the small curves and so you're just going to keep continue stitching until our embroidery is done now i'm going to stop here on the front i'm not going to stitch the whole thing i'm going to show you on the back how we're going to anchor our stitch with the tail that we left okay so you're going to thread this tail and your needle again oh there's one all done well get it sure we will i should have left a longer tail or had less coffee this morning bear with me we're getting it but this is a nice way to anchor your threads so that you don't have to have a knot in the back oh my gosh one again well i'll do it with one so you get the idea so you're gonna thread both threads through and then you're just gonna take and you're gonna go under the stitches on the back one way and then the other way and then back through again and that's going to anchor your tails and then you can just cut those off and then that way you don't have any knots on the back of your piece so you will continue of course embroidering until you finish the word and i'm going to bring this down here okay so there's our finished word and this has been all fused down now when we put it on our background let me take this out of the hoop you're going to be top stitching onto this to secure it to the background permanently cut that off okay so here's our background here's our motif we were working with okay so you're going to be putting it on your background now if you use a foundation that's heavy there's several different ones that are heavier or a lightweight fabric some people use you know a thin wall fabric you to adhere it to your background then you have to put another layer of fusible then your collage is going to get very stiff and very thick so the whisper light over to the iron here the whisper light is porous enough that when you put it on your background and fuse it again enough of the fusible will come through the whisper light and tack it to your background so that way you don't have to put a second layer of fusible which makes it very bulky very stiff and harder to stitch through when we do our top stitching so again you just of course this hasn't all been trimmed away but to save time i don't want to waste all your time watching me so you can go have fun and start doing this get all your fun fabrics together get your fusibles together okay so that is tacked down so then one of the final steps in the collage is edge stitching okay we're not talking a satin or a zigzag stitch we are talking about a simple straight stitch with a thread that kind of blends with most of your fabrics you're not going to find the perfect thread that's going to blend with everything if you're a real stickler you could stop and change thread colors all the time but i'm sorry i'm not going to do that so we are simply going to stitch very close to the edge of our let's go forward to the edge of our fabric just edge stitching and just a straight stitch and you're just going to follow it along and i will show you over here see if we can get a close-up of the edge stitching you can see here i've edge stitched along the whole edge of the outside okay i haven't gotten the inside done yet and then you might want to go along and do some stitching within the motifs as well now collage quilts are not going to be washed they're probably not going to be used on a bed they're mainly wall pieces um in fact you could turn this into you could put by a large embroidery hoop and just hoop this and put it on your wall or you what i'm most likely going to do is put batting and backing on this like a quilt do some quilting and bind it and it'll be a wall piece or maybe a pillow but it's not something that you're going to be throwing in the wash which is why you don't have to do a zigzag stitch over all the edges it's called raw edge applique and you're just stitching with a straight stitch along the edge if you were to wash this then of course you're going to get the fabric fraying a little bit and we don't really want that on this so that's how you finish it off your actual collage onto your background so to reiterate you are going to trace your design onto the foundation and then you are going to cut all your fabric pieces all your little motifs out of your fun fabrics all the fabrics that have interesting large motifs and elements to cut then you're going to take the paper fusible packing off and now you have fusible on the back of your fabrics you're going to place your fabrics on your pattern fill it all in carefully take it over to your ironing surface iron it in place trim away the outer foundation and the inner foundation after you trace your heart i mean your love you're going to embroider this this is fused in place top stitch in place and then you'll finish it off into the project of your choice but it's a really fun technique i really enjoy doing this like i said it feeds your playful and artistic side it's just a lot of cutting and playing and color and placement and anyone can do it don't be afraid to try it it's really a fun thing to do and as you can see the whisper light foundation because you can fuse it a second time to your foundation without adding a second layer of fusible is fabulous you can it trims away nice and clean you can draw on it nice and easy it's super lightweight it's not adding a whole other layer of bulk because you already have fabric with fusible which makes it stiff and so it really is give it a try is a great foundation to use for collage quilts and my whisper light comes in one yard two yard five yard packages and we sell it in 25 yard bolts you can wash it draw on it iron it on medium and you'll see other uses in my other videos and i hope this was helpful if you have any questions let me know happy to answer thanks for joining me again i'll see you in the next video bye

Channel: Thistledown and Company quilts

Views: 87,044

Rating: 4.866353 out of 5

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Id: t_wWskVZ6po

Length: 33min 23sec (2003 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020