Machine Applique Technique

hi everyone it's kathy drew from gina's bernina sewing center i hope you're having a wonderful day have you ever wondered about how to do applique well in today's video that's what we're going to do so i'm going to show you some of my favorite notions and tools that i use to get the job done and hopefully it will help you get started with applique as well so stay tuned and we'll be right back so as you can see i've got an assortment of things set out for you to look at and for us to talk about and what we're going to applique today will be this watermelon now when you're looking at the patterns and especially if it's a quilt book of patterns make sure you check to see if they want the design reversed so that's about the only thing that you'll have to be cautious about is some of the patterns will ask you to reverse it and the easiest thing that you can do is just run it through your uh copy machine and reverse it that way the product that i like to use and we always use this at gina's is a steamism ii now steam a seam comes you can buy it by the yard or you can also buy it by the sheet so i usually buy mine by the yard and i keep it rolled up in in a nice little bundle and protected and we love steam a seam too because it has two fin coverings on it these coverings are almost like a parchment paper so you can easily see through them to trace your design as you can see now one side of the covering on the steam seam 2 has a yellow grid on it and that is the side you're going to trace your design and if i flip it over you'll see that the other side does not and uh so we're going to trace our design but i wanted to show you something this design is coming out of just a little clip art book that i happen to have and what i want to be cautious of is i want the rind of the watermelon to be in my background so what that means is that i'm going to cut that piece just a little bit larger than the center of the watermelon itself so i will mark myself just a few little dotted lines on this pattern just so that i can be sure that this piece will be a little bit larger in the right area and then my red or pink piece whichever you plan on using will go on top of that edge okay so i'm going to position my steam a seam down and i'm going to go ahead and get that trace and so i won't forget that i'm going to go ahead and trace that inner line that i just drew in first now the pin that i am using is a micron pen you can trace these out with any marking tool that you want because keep in mind that this part of the steamous seam that we are tracing on will be removed so you don't have to worry about any of this showing up in your stitching now i'm not the best tracer when i'm standing up but i think you'll get the point we'll try to neaten it up a little bit when i do my cutting all right so i've almost got that rind done and then on that same piece i'm just going to slide it down and i'm going to trace what would be the red or pink part of the watermelon and i know you guys know how to trace but in doing this video it's just easier for me to just go ahead and do it all right i've got him pretty well done and like i say i'm not a good tracer standing up so okay we're going to cut these pieces apart just to make them a little bit easier to handle because the rind of course is going to go on our green fabric and this will go on our red now i don't want to go ahead now at this point and cut it out on the drawn line because i want to make sure that when i cut i'm going to have it easy adhesive all the way to the edge so we're just going to trim it off just to make it a little bit easier to handle nothing major here all right so i'm going to take my green fabric this is a batik and it's really hard to tell the right and the wrong side of this so i'm just going to say this is my wrong side and i'm going to peel off the ungritted portion of the steama seam and it leaves a very tacky surface on the back and i'm just going to position that in place and smooth him down and while we're doing that let's do the same thing for our red now the thing about steamism 2 is you can continue to reposition this which is wonderful when you're doing the placement on your background fabric you can reposition and get it exactly where you want it now do you understand why i wanted to wait until i actually was doing my cutting so that when i cut on that drawn line of the design i am assured that i have adhesive all the way to the edge and did you also notice that we have not fused it down with the heat of the iron that's another thing that makes it great to work with and so now we've got this part cut and i will do my rind like i said i'm going to try to neaten up and smooth out these wobbly lines from my shaky hand when i'm doing my cutting okay so we've got them both cut out and i'm going to move my book aside oh and listen while i'm thinking about it i know some of you are going to be asking me who made the pattern of the quilt that's behind me and that is called the friendship strips and scraps by edita sitar if any of you are interested now this is my background fabric got my little iron heating up you know i love my little alyssa iron this is going to be our background fabric and remember how we cut the rind a little bit bigger that's so that it will fit underneath our watermelon so we may have to do some repositioning and that's what makes this wonderful to get the backing off of the um the green fabric simply crimp it to the wrong side or to the remaining paper side right there just crimp it over and pull it off and we're just going to position it in place you can smooth it and it will stay on but yet if you need to reposition you simply pull it off and it will still be tacky enough for you to reposition and there again that is steam a seam two once again we're going to crimp to the paper side just a little corner and that will allow it to lift and then we are going to position our watermelon so as you can see it's going to might be really handy to be able to reposition our watermelon piece being able to lift it up see right there my edge was coming over let's try one more time so isn't that wonderful to be able to do that repositioning and we have it smooth it and then when you're happy with how you have it placed then you're going to fuse it with the iron it only takes maybe four or five seconds of heat you can use steam a seam or it can use steam with this product i usually flip mine over and i don't have any steam on or in my iron right now but i usually will flip it over and position the iron on the back as well and as you can see we are fused and ready to stitch now before i get to the sewing machine and start stitching out our design i want to talk to you about the threads that i'm going to be using i like to put a 60 weight cotton thread in my bobbin that keeps the bulk out of the stitching and allows you to get a really fine beautiful satin stitch works perfect with any type of machine embellishment anytime i do decorative stitches or anything like that i always use a lightweight thread in my bobbin so this is mettler's 60 weight uh cotton and it's going to really go a long way especially if you have those big bobbins in in your machine it's really going to put a lot of thread on that bobbin because it is a much lighter weight so this is what i always use in the bobbin i usually just buy it in white because i don't have any reason to have it in colors we can make sure that none of the bobbin thread shows on the top all right and i like to also use a 40 weight embroidery thread in the needle this is a polyester embroidery thread this is isocord it is also a lighter weight thread this is the same thread that we use whenever we're doing a machine embroidery so it's perfect and it allows you to really do some fine tuning on that stitch length to get the prettiest satin stitch that you can get now we're going to be doing blanket stitches also and some other things this morning but i just wanted to comment on how beautiful you can fine tune your stitch length with a lighter weighted thread so since this is the 40 weight i support embroidery thread you can get it in cotton or rayon whatever your preference is i just like to use polyester because it's color fast and very strong thread okay and of course i talked to you about the micropen okido and so that covers pretty much the threads and so forth that you're going to be using i also like to use a microtex either a size 80 or a size 90 needle in my machine as well that's pretty much my favorite needle i buy it all the time and you can also get it in the chrome which uh increases the longevity and doesn't let the needle hit up and uh heat up and cause uh skip stitches for you so that should cover that and when we get to the machine and get it threaded we'll talk about the presser feet i hope that helped okay i've got my machine threaded and i am going to now go in and make some adjustments to the settings of the machine to make it function um better for me in the technique that i'm going to be doing which is applique so i'm going to go into settings which is represented by what looks like a set of little gears and this is on the bernina 880 plus and those of you on some of the other models are going to have all these options available to you but what you'll do is you'll tap your home icon first the little house that i'm pointing to at the top and then once you're in there at the bottom of the screen you should see the settings icon and you'll find all the things that i'm talking about that we're going to be adjusting the machine uh to help us with our applique the first thing i want to do though is going to be on my main screen and you'll notice that i have my needle set in the needle up position which means that whenever i stop sewing my needle is going to stop up out of the fabric i'm going to immediately change that by tapping it and now i have set it to where the needle will always stop down in my fabric so if i have to pivot to turn sharp curves or corners that's going to be very beneficial to me we're going to go into our settings screen now and once we're in that particular screen you have six categories but we're going to go into our sewing settings which was represented by that straight stitch in zigzag now there's a picture of a hand that is pointing toward buttons and this represents all those buttons that are external or on the outside of your machine that you might be using like your thread cutter button or your needle down button all of those that are on the outside of the machine so we're going to go into that particular category and it's going to show pictures of all those different icons that you have on your screen or that represent those buttons so on the needle down i think i want my machine to lift my presser foot a little for me so that i don't have to stop and push my presser foot lifter button or use a needle down or something like that so we're going to go into this needle down icon and you'll notice that there are three pictures one of them shows the needle going down in the fabric and the presser foot remaining in the down position and right now that's the one that is selected for me i'm going to go to the next one over and i'm going to select it because i want the machine to slightly lift the presser foot for me once it puts that needle down in the fabric now you'll notice there's another option here that's if you're working on much heavier fabric and you need a higher lift but we're going to leave ours right here and then i'm going to use the breadcrumb and go back a screen and i'm going to have my scissors because i want to add a few features to my uh button on the front of the screen that i pressed when i wanted to cut my threads so when i go in to that particular icon let me go back in case i did that too fast it's a little button with a picture of your scissors on it i'm going to tap that and my option for the uh cutting tool is to also have it secure my threads so i'm going to tap that and i think for my applique i'm going to select this diamond shape securing stitch that it offers us and i think that will be perfect so what's going to happen now that i've programmed that is before the machine cuts my threads both needle and bobbin it will secure those threads and that's a great feature to have and i think we're through in that particular screen now we're going to be using the 20 foot so let's just go ahead and go in by tapping the presser foot icon now some of you don't have uh this is an option to tell the machine that you want what foot you're going to be using but those of you that do i want you to just be aware of the screen and on the top of the screen you'll notice that there is a search icon and i'm going to tap that and put in presser foot 20 and it's going to bring up all the 20 feet we have three one for the five millimeter machines one for the nine millimeter and a 20 d which is for the nine millimeter and dual feed machines now i'm going to use 20c today so i'm going to select that and you'll notice that the number on the left of my screen now reflects that presser foot okay i think we're about ready but i want to point out we are in the practical sewing screen at this time we're going to go into a program of quilting stitches which is represented by that little uh looks like a quilt block and i'm going to tap that and it's going to list all the different stitches that has a quilter that you might want to use now we can go in and set those set stitches at the width and the length that we want and the machine will remember those settings for us until we turn it off or clear them out and we're going to start out sewing i think with our satin stitch now on the 880 it stitched 1354 on some of the other models from the four series on up you'll probably want to check your manual for the satin stitch okay now it comes up at a stitch width of 2.5 which is very small and a stitch length of 0.6 both of those are completely adjustable you can fine tune your stitch width or your length to anything you need it to be so we're going to run some test runs in just a second the other stitch that i'll be using is 13 29 which will be our blanket stitch and there again we can adjust it to whatever look that we want it to have and we'll talk about that a little bit more in just a second so i'm going to reposition the camera and try to zoom in to where you can see the stitching a little bit better and we'll get some sewing done the pressure feet that you're looking at are the ones that are most commonly used for basic machine applique so you'll see this is the 20c which is a much larger foot than the 20 for our 5.5 millimeter machines now i have both of these feet because there are times when i'm working on maybe something really small or that i have uh i'm using much tinier stitches that i enjoy using the 20 even though i have a nine millimeter machine so i wanted to show you all uh the differences in the size but to tell you also that if you've had another bernina that was a five millimeter you can still use this number 20 on your nine millimeter machine if you look at the bottom of the presser foot you're going to notice that the bottom is cut out at an angle and i love this because when you're working with a thick satin stitch it this allows for that thickness to feed out from under toward the back of the foot but having these angles allows it to make it easier for you to turn a curve with that bulkier stitch that you probably would use with your applique so i'm going to go ahead and slip this presser foot on and i'll stick with the 20 primarily because i think it'll make it a little bit easier for you to see the stitching that i'm going to do i'm going to go into my quilt program of stitches just like we talked about earlier and i'm going to select stitch 13 54 and i'm going to widen that stitch with um i think i'll go up to maybe three and a half and then i'm going to stitch a test run down along the side now whenever you get a stitch width much wider than a three you may find that your fabric will try to tunnel in your stitching and so if that happens if you see that pinching up or tunneling of your fabric you may need to use a stabilizer and if you look you can see that i have got a couple of layers of tearaway stabilizer now i normally would probably use my ultra clean and tear but for this i i was out of it so i'm going to stick with the two layers of lightweight tearaway now let's sew a little bit of our stitch and see if we like how it looks because we might want to alter the length of that stitch or the width of that stitch we don't want the stitching to overpower our applique at all and let me cut and you'll see the securing stitches and then it cuts and you know what that looks pretty good i think that stitch length could be just a little bit shorter [Music] so i'm going to probably go down to a 0.5 on that and we'll test it again let's see how this .5 looks so these are the things you always want to do before you start your project is run you a little tester yes that looks much better can you all see how much prettier that looks okay so i like that and i'm going to stick with that and that's a stitch that i'm going to use around the rind of the applique now i want to give the appearance of this being in the background so that's why we overlapped the red on top and i'm actually going to start my sewing right up against the red of the watermelon and whenever i do applique one thing that i like to do is i like to move my needle position as far to the right as it will go and the reason i do that is i can then use the inside edge of the right toe as a means of lining up my fabric okay so let me see and you know what there's one other thing that i forgot to go into settings and do and i'm going to do it very quickly right now is i want to make sure that my securing stitch at the beginning is also engaged because i want my threads secured at the beginning as well now i use my presser foot button to lower my presser foot and that way i can fine tune that positioning and i hope i can explain this but what i'm going to do i am going to actually stop my stitching an equal distance to the width of my stitch from this point now that may sound a little crazy to you but i think once you see me do it you'll be okay i'm going to do a needle down to make sure that my uh needle is going to hit right along the edge and it certainly did and we'll begin our stitching now i'm going to let you watch me i'm going to stitch down until i'm just about a distance from the edge that equals the width of my stitch so did y'all see that and we'll go down one more stitch all right now i'm going to turn my fabric and i'm going to raise my presser foot and my needle out and then i'm going to move over and line the edge up because i don't want that really bulky stitch when you stitch an overlap so i'm going to lower my presser foot let it hover line the edge up to the inside edge of that toe and start my stitching again and then that way i don't get that bulky edge of where you sew over it twice with that satin stitch and i love being being able to guide my fabric along the inside edge of the toe of my presser foot now if you should have to pivot now this curve is not really too tight but if you find that you feel like you just can't stay on that edge then put your needle down on the outer edge or the wider edge of the curve your foot will hover because that's how we've set it and then give it a slight turn and continue until you need to do your pivot again we want the bulk of our stitch to be on the applique itself that's what's going to hold it and keep it secured to our background fabric i'm trying to speed up a little so y'all don't have to be bored while i'm stitching all the way around this and i want you to notice too a lot of people think they have to hurry and turn their fabric but when you have your satin stitch set at such a short stitch length the fabric moves fairly slow so you don't have to be in a hurry for your guiding you can just relax all right once again i'm going to sew down almost to the edge of my corner i like to put my needle down in the outside edge so i'm just going to do a needle up and a needle down again all right and then i'll go ahead and turn it lift my needle and line and pack up to a needle down if you want to there we go see where it's going to hit perfect and then we have decreased all that bulk in that corner and when i get back up to the red i'll stop and i'll press my thread cutter and i have told it to secure my stitches and we've got this applique finished all right so see how that corner looks can you see that looks much better it's not a big old hump right there from where you have two runs of your satin stitch one on top of the other all right let's thread up with our thread for our watermelon i'm ready to think about spring and summer anyway and i'm going to go ahead and pull i don't have to but i'm going to go ahead and pull my thread tail down and get it under the foot so i can hold on to it now let's go in and i'm still in my quilt program of stitches and i'm going to select stitch number 1329 and that's what we're going to use to stitch our watermelon with once again i'm going to move that needle position all the way to the right um let's make it just a little bit wider i think i'm going to put it up on about three okay and i'm going to line that edge and i really don't like to start on a point or a corner i prefer to start you know somewhere else we could have started up here i like to be able to start somewhere that when i'm approaching where i begin i can kind of make sure that it's going to end nice and pretty for me so we'll start maybe right about here [Music] okay now we want the bulk of our stitch of course to be on the applique so the right swing of the needle is going to fall off the edge and the left swing is going to pierce the applique now this is just a basic blanket stitch there are some in there that are much much heavier but for today's video we're going to use the lighter version so that you can keep up with the stitching on it a little bit so let's just begin and you're going to notice a securing stitch and then we start with our blanket there again the right swing of the needle now see how i'm getting to where it's a little difficult for me to keep the edge up against the inside edge of the toe of the foot when that needle goes down on the right this time i'm going to slightly move my fabric so that's a good way to guide so here we go again see how that because if we don't do our pivoting your stitches are going to be angled so whenever it becomes difficult for you to keep that cut edge up against the inside edge of that toe to stop with the needle down on the outside edge or the wider area look at that see how that angle is going in and pivot and straighten it up now with a blanket stitch i'm going to get that thread tail out of my way with a blanket stitch it's really hard to know if it's going to end up to where you can do that perfect pivot on that point so sometimes you might just have to make it work i think we're going to look out it looks pretty good but let's see i think probably i need to maybe cheat just a little so i'm going to take that needle up out of that fabric and move my fabric on my own and make sure that that needle falls right on that point now you don't have to be this careful but i do it so keto and we're going to turn and take one across the point and turn again and then approach down the other side got a nice straight edge here so we don't have to worry about pivoting so we can make up for some time got another one of those corners popping up on us i wonder if we'll be lucky this time nope i think we're still gonna have to oh maybe not bingo we made it so the needle's down on the point and i like to turn and stitch across that point and turn again with the needle down on the right and continue i'm getting off my line again so i've got a needle down on the wider area outside edge and pivot i love having the hover preset to where the foot lifts for me and i don't have to press a button or use my presser foot lever or if you don't have this option on your machine don't forget about bernina's fabulous knee lift the freehand system you can have that set up and it'll be perfect for applique just use your knee holy there we made it and i'm going to tell it that i'm finished with my stitching so i am going to set my thread cutter and it's secured and my stitching is finished and we have a precious little watermelon i hope that helped you a little bit with your applique oh we need to do some something decorative in there uh you could put little buttons in or you could pull up one of your decorative stitches off your machine and put them in in black that would be really cute and there's all different things that you could use for the center okay now i have something else i wanted to throw in just a little bit a lot of people like to do what they call blind applique what that is is where the uh edges of the fabric are actually turned under because here we were working with cut edges raw edges but they like to have that hand look effect so um there are lots of different ways to do that they use glue and different things but i thought i would show you very quickly maybe a quick way for some of your simpler patterns what you can do i have um cut this time on the drawn line of the circle that i put on my steam seam two and i'm going to trim around the circle leaving approximately a quarter of an inch all the way around now i'm not necessarily going to make you sit and watch me do this whole thing but i do want to do enough to give you a general idea of what we're going to do is that camera zoom back enough it's a little bit too close okay and then we are going to snip and maybe a little quarter of an inch intervals in along this edge and then before i remove this paper i'm just going to take my fingernail and press and put a crease in that fabric along the edge and that paper will really help me do that um and keep it right on that that guide okay and then afterwards we can peel off our steam machine [Music] and when we push these over the steamer seam will hold them in place give them a good press there with your thumb okay and that's just a quick way on some of your simpler designs that you could get a turned edge for your applique okay and then you can neaten it up on that other side when you look at it so i have got one ready and we are going to stitch it and this time time i'm going to use a different presser foot i'm going to use presser foot number 23 and i like this little foot it is actually called the blind applique foot but we use it for multiple things we call we use it for the blind applique because it has that little channeled out area in the bottom of the foot that you can butt the fold of that fabric of your applique up against the side and it will hold it securely it also has an area channeled out at an angle in the back that's going to make it easier for you to turn those curved edges i'm going to slide the opening of the foot where the needle travels up my needle reach under and pull my thread down i always like my thread to be under my presser foot so i know exactly where it is now for this stitch there is a stitch in your machine it's 13 31 that's set up i'm going to show it to you i'm going to stitch just a little of it my machine wants me to tell it what presser foot i have on so let me do that and now it will let me do my stitching so here's the stitch that they've got in your quilt program for you to use and it works really well for this there's some other stitches that you can use also i'm going to make mine much tinier than that because i want it to be less visible so i've got mine set on a stitch width of about 1.5 and if you wanted to bring those stitches closer together by all means you could adjust the stitch length also now let's take a look at the stitch so you can see what it looks like okay so there's the program setting and then i've just made mine a little bit smaller all right and i'm gonna position this edge into the ditch of the foot [Music] all righty and i want to make sure that the very that the stitch that it swings on the left it hits my fabric and when it swings on the right it's going to clear that little edge that little lip and then i'm just going to slowly stitch around so you guys can watch and this just is trying to give you a little bit more of a hand look finish and that's enough i don't want to make you watch me do all the way around and i'll show you how it looks and that is let me fold that back so maybe the light that is the blind applique let me see if i can zoom in a little for you and see that a little better isn't that pretty so that's just another look for applique that you can use let me show you that edge that corner that i did earlier where i showed you how to not put so much bulk by turning and pivoting and going over the same area twice on the corner so um hopefully this will help you all and uh give you a few things that you can try and get ready to do some beautiful applique it's one of the prettier things that you can add to your quilts or your garments i love adding applique to garments as well so i hope you enjoyed that and of course if you have any questions be sure and put them in the comments and i'll try to get back with you just as quickly as i can as always if there's anything we can help you with you can reach us at info geniusbernina.com or check our website www.genusbernina.com i hope you all have a wonderful day and thank you so much for joining me

Channel: Gina's Bernina Sewing Center

Views: 21,449

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Id: qkWzV4XFJrQ

Length: 41min 54sec (2514 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021