Insider Tips Teach Me to Appliqué with Pat Sloan

hi I'm have flown and I love to applique and that's a type of quilt-making that if you haven't tried it yet I want to show you how incredibly easy and fun and freeing it is to do shapes and that's basically what applique is there's a few ways that you set up your machine a few a few things that you figure out first and then after that it's super easy using small projects like little mini quilts little wall hangings like we have up on the wall here are great ways to have one project that you can go the whole way through without having to do a big massive quote and get all there sort of techniques locked down now the first thing you have to think about what's applique is your foot because you can sew with any foot that lets you move the needle back and forth you know I think zigzag that any of those feet will work but it's a lot better if you switch and use an open toe foot an open toe foot is like a you it doesn't have a bar and the bar is what blocks your visibility and so we want total visibility when we're doing this I'm going to show you how to change the feet because I love my baby lock machines they're so easy you just click the little button and the standard I'm taking the standard foot off so I'm going to pop the foot in here which is super easy it just clicks up into the groove and now it's locked in place that I can use it with the blanket stitching which is the the decorative stitch that I use to attach my application to the background the blanket stitch you will want to find it on your machine and we're going to set this one up in the stitch that I like to use so I'm gonna do that part first and then we'll talk about the thread color that we're going to stitch with and those are all the basics that you really need to know before you stand get set up before you start stitching so I want to show you the stitch and how we find it on the machine so right now we're on the utility section so here's your Tilly's touches a straight stitch but there's several places and many styles of blanket stitch on this machine which is a crescendo I'm going to pull up here the the basic quilting stitches which is under Q and there are quite a few I think there's four and you could have blanket stitch that does multiple straights you could have a blanket stitches does multiple bites you could have a some that don't even adjust they're just set for that purpose but you know those have uses but I prefer a different one and the one I prefer is on the decorative stitch menu so up here I will click over to the decorative stitches and now there are several options and I know the one that I like is under seven so I will go into decorative stitch set seven and go down one level to seven eleven and seven eleven is my preferred blanket stitch which is one straight and one bite so it's the cleanest one that I prefer to use now most decorative stitches come with a base or default come with a default setting number I prefer my blanket stitch to be the same width in the same length I think that is the tiniest and looks the nicest to me personally so I want to change my default width down to match my default length which is two point five and now my machine is set this is what I mostly use so everything is set up I use that foot I use this stitch so the next step now is to determine your thread color and that is going to change by project by what the fabrics are that you use and so for this sweet B project I've got the circles those is the unit that I'll be stitching on for you so I want to pick a thread color that complements them I could do a thread color that matches it pretty well so if it's gone it's a blue stripe so if I put this blue down it's going to be pretty blending which is nice or I could do something that is a bit lighter than that which is this a kind of a gray taupe and I like that because it sort of transitions between the lighter and the darker stripes nicely and is not as much of maybe a feature as if I was going to go very high contrast so I'm gonna pick the gray and that's already loaded onto the machine so I can just get ready to stitch I've got the open-toe applique foot on and one of the decisions points you have now is if your machine is available to do this you want to set your needle position so that every time that you stop the needle is down so that's the needle position down somewhere on your machine you can this machine will allow me to have it as a default so that every time it's always going to be needle down that also allows me on this machine to when I put the I'll go put the presser foot down so first let me get close to where I am I can see my needle and I need to be on the edge of the shape the circle and that is where this needle is going to to hit you can always get like real up close yourself to be sure you're positioned properly but what I do needle down watch what happens my presser foot lifts because this feature is set on my machine first is me having to come back here and lift it manually or with a knee lift so many people have a knee lift also that's another perfect way it's like a third hand but I'm gonna be taking advantage of the needle needle down with the presser foot lifting automatically so I'm pretty much ready to stitch I could just start now but you'll notice the threads haven't been locked there's you know they're just sort of loose that first thread so I could do and I this is how I often do it is just a locking stitch so I'm going to do a couple stitches in place and that locks those threads from this point I'm going to start sewing around the the circle and you're gonna have to stop and start more often on a circle because of the curve otherwise you'll be going straight out into the background which you wouldn't you know that wouldn't look right so we're gonna go around the curve which means you'll stop and start now if you feel like you need more control where is a speed control on many machines which is amazing you can slow it way down so you can be like like a you know like a tortoise or you can you know zoom like the rabbit but I'm gonna go ahead and put this in the middle now that means I'll be stitching you know like at a medium pace which is a nice pace to work at and I'm going to go around so do these this is 1 by 8 one straight stitch 1 by 8 one straight stitch on now I'm on the edge and I need to pivot the whole fabric panel here the you know the background the applique because I want to be going around that curve nicely so I did another bite and a straight stitch and I'm just hitting my foot pedal one at a time because on a circle it you know if you want to have a lot of control you could do it that way now I can go a few here I'm kind of on the curve and now rotate this way I'm always getting a smooth look to what I'm doing and I'm doing a few more and you never want to change and rotate here right now my needle is in the applique if I were to do that I would get like a V so rather than the stitch being straight like this if I rotated now the stitch would come out and it would be this V so if we don't want to do that we'll come back out so we'll do a couple more stitches and I'll show you another little control feature that you may not have thought of using which is really nice so right now I'm on the curve and I want to do the bite before I rotate so I want to do a bite into the application shape before I rotate I can do needle down and needle up needle down needle up walking my stitch one at a time each portion of the stitch with the needle up needle down button and therefore I'm not accidentally with my foot pedal going too fast and doing too many stitches so that's another control way of working that you might not have try so we're gonna come around and now we'll just finish up this one circle so that I can show you how to end it now let's say when you are doing this work you don't want to do a stopping and starting stitch for some reason you you the other option really to secure your threads is to pull them to the back and tie them you know tie a knot and you might do that on like a baby quilt that you're making that you know is going to be heavily washed that might be a time you would do that so I'm still rotating and I am finally getting around to the other side just a little bit more and I can go a little faster here just because I I know that practice you'd make let you go a little bit quicker so as I get around to the end I want to get as close to that last stitch as possible before I stop there there's a little bit of a gap there I could maybe fit one more but I'm not going to I'm just going to end it and because I just did the bite I'm in the background of the fabric and I can do my locking stitch now so it is ended then I could cut the threads which will pull them to the back so cut the threads and then this releases it I will come in then and trim trim this off and that is going around the circle now that I showed you how easy it is to stitch a fusible applique I want to tell you a little bit about how I approach the applique order you know what kind of order do I stitch all of this in if you're a hand applicator there's some specific orders in order to so that things turn out proper but in fusible and machine appliqué you pretty much can stitch whatever piece you want to stitch at any time but you can be more effective and that gives you just takes you a few minutes just to look at your project and decide well what order do I want to do this in so I'll use this one as an example because it's got several ways you could approach it you could say I'm gonna stitch all the green first that would be one approach you could just do all the green and then you're done with the green then stitch the blue in this dish the red that's one way of approaching it if you're going to change thread colors let's say you want to keep the same thread color well then the most efficient way is to do this whole flower unit at once and do as much as you can without stopping I always like to start where there's a junction except for circles because you know they're freeform but if there's a junction that's what I want to stop rather than starting like in the middle of this stem I want to start right where it hits the the the center unit the center medallion unit so I would start here and I would come up to the leaf and then I can stitch my leaf and then I can sort of back stitch and fill in the rest of my stem if I was doing this circle I would be all the way around the circle then I could actually finish by going back here stitch the other leaf and finish the stem that would be a way to do all of this part and then go and do the flower by starting here if you've really wanted to try applique I hope that this showed you just how easy it can be that you can start simple you can just go get some fabric now try some shapes use them down do a little stitching with your machine see how it all goes and if you want to learn more about the different techniques and how to really be efficient and dive a little bit deeper into this I wrote a book about who's black okay teach me to applique which is like a class in a book so there you go you can try it out and now you can add applique to your toolbox of quilting skills thanks for watching and thanks for joining me you can find more videos right here at the site [Music] [Music]

Channel: Baby Lock USA & Canada Sewing

Views: 60,989

Rating: 4.9101844 out of 5

Keywords: quilting, quilt, machine quilting, quilt project, applique quilt, Pat Sloan

Id: e6_LDMf4qo4

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 31 2018