Over the Meadow - Lesson 1 - Intro to Freezer Paper and Needle Turn Applique

this episode of McCall's quilting will to long is brought to you by Moda producer of quilting fabric and hung of the fabric pre-cut [Music] hi I'm Jan with Jan Patti quilts and we're doing a McCall's quilt along of my quilt over the meadow and through the year it's made of Fernhill fabric designed by me for moto fabrics and hosts journey fabric designed by Betsy Chechen for moto fabrics and I would highly suggest if you want to make this quilt that looks just like this you get a kit from mccolts what we're going to learn today is freezer paper applique and needle turn that's what I teach obviously you need freezer paper and you can get freezer paper on a roll it's particularly available during the hunting season but it's available the rest of the year at grocery stores I believe because a lot of women use it to freeze actually freeze meat in and AH somewhere along the line some farmer's wife or hunters wife figured out that if you iron it to fabric it will stick and if it sticks you can use it for a pattern and I think the whole applique and really it's used for templates - piecing part of quilting got revolutionized by that I get mine in sheets because just simply because it's easier and it doesn't roll but it's also a little more expensive so in both the stuff on the roll and the stuff in the sheets this is Jenkins freezer paper you can get it at my website if you can't find it anyplace else if your local quilt shop doesn't have it and both sets of freezer paper the stuff on the roll and the stuff in the sheets will have a matte side and a shiny side you're going to draw on the map side ok and you're going to iron the shiny side to your fabric the other thing you you really are going to need is good needles for needle turn and when I first started doing applique is quilting betweens and as you know they're very short and you just use the tip when you're quilting but when you're applique you use the whole needle you hold the needle and so I really after a while found out these work better they're Milner's or straw needles size 8 or size 9 and as you can see they're long and they're a lot easier to hold and a lot easier to work with your fingers don't cramp up I use richard hemming or john james they're good sturdy needles and don't bend I must be pretty intense because there's some brands and needles that Bend whenever I use them so okay that's the needles you use here's the freezer paper take your pattern page and you can either use a lightbox you can use a window most of the time you can just lay it on the table and lay this on top and draw your pattern off of it for something like the bottom the first thing we're going to do is the grass that's in block one the grass or ground is in all the blocks so we're going to use that and to do the straight lines I tend to use a ruler because it's really straight lines or harder and curves all right and then you just trace around it here and you draw exactly on the line this is your stitching line so you want it to be exactly like the pattern is okay and so then we're going to draw the other ones you take a pair of scissors and cut the out so now we've cut out our to pattern pieces that we drew and we're going to need to iron them on but since this is going to go to the bottom of the block we want to know and then we're going to sew it on we need to know this needs to be exactly 1/4 of an inch up from the bottom of the fabric you may have to take your fabric with your rotary cutter and straighten it and make sure it's straight but once you have done that then we need to take a ruler and we're going to need to draw now here's where your sandpaper board comes in and not all quilt shows have sandpaper boards I have trouble finding hole suppliers but I think I have found somebody to make them for me you can get them on my website if you can't find them in your local quilt shop but if you're not sure about what you're doing and you're having to buy a lot of things to begin with you can make one my husband made me want to begin with you just get fine fine grade sandpaper and glue it to the back of a piece of cardboard glue it to the back of a clipboard or a file folder so that your sandpaper is on there and this you use constantly in applique all right now what I'm going to do is lay my piece of fabric on there and take my ruler and come up a fourth of an inch and draw a line and what the sandpaper board does is hold your fabric in place so it doesn't stretch while you're drawing your line or drawing around your pattern and it's just it's also great for labels you can put a label on the sandpaper board and write your name on it ok so now we know exactly we're a fourth of an inch is on this piece of fabric and we can put our sandpaper board down we'll get it later believe me okay now what we want to do come here you we're going to use you in a minute don't be greedy okay we need to lay this right along the line and but this up to here your two pieces of the ground now we're going to hope that the iron's kind of heated up we may have to just let it sit there for a while and I think I'm just going to do that yeah it's just a half sit there for a second because if it doesn't it won't stick and we need it to stick yeah there we go all right now we can move this down and we can lay that along there okay now that will turn itself off before we need to use it again but that's the way it works okay now your freezer paper is on there it stays in place your sand paper holds sand paper board holds your fabric in place and now when you cut this out you don't have to cut this out exactly 1/4 because you're going to be turning it under this had to be exactly 1/4 because it's got to match the bottom of the block ok so now you take this and where are my scissors they're right here and just cut eyeball 1/4 of an inch to cut out along the edge of your grass because what we're going to do now is we're going to sew our grass or our ground if it's snow to the bottom of the block ok see I don't have enough places to put things there that'll now I can grab that any time I need it okay now what you we are going to do with this now that we've done that is we're going to sew it to the bottom of our quilt block that we've cut to size and that is in the directions what size to cut this okay make sure you add seam allowance and it should tell you that now what is hard here if you tried to pin this on and just sew this under those long lines are difficult to turn under evenly so usually what I do is just thread your needle and do a basting stitch and I'm sure most of you know what that is but in case you don't it's a long loose stitch and just baste that under okay okay because this time what we're going to do is we are going to besides learning about freezer paper applique and what needles to use we're going to and see that's why you've got to use it I probably didn't need quite that much read but I always tend to do that I always tend to get twice as much thread as I need and I think this time I got about 10 times as much thread as I need because we're going to base that under and we've just got a little left okay and you can see where I've drawn the line at the bottom of this so we'll be exactly 1/4 of an inch in because everybody knows in quilting that's your seam allowance okay now I don't know what I did with my little ones put that back in there okay now we're going to have to sew that on and we can use silk pins and if you use silk pins I use if I use pins I use soap pins because they're real fine and they leave very small holes in the fabric and they go through very easily but on something like this if you're going to do it you're going to have to have so many pins in it you're going to stick your fingers all over everywhere so I use glue instead and I tend to use gel Lily apply glue because the tip is shorter and that makes it easier so you just turn this little sucker over and put dots of glue right along here don't blue where the basting is because if you do well if you do it's no big deal you just have to cut the thread and pull it out one by one instead of the whole thing okay and then you line this up on the bottom put it like that and press it down okay now we're going to leave that sitting for a while before I sew it down so it stays in what I do at this stage to make sure my glue does not stop up which it will in the tip is I have a toothpick I keep in there and keep close and a napkin or a Kleenex and I take the tip and put it through so it's open I know it's open then I put the lid on because otherwise even this short tip will clog up and then make sure you wipe off your toothpick and you can use it over and over and over again which I do okay now we have the base but we need the scallops to go around I've only cut one scallop you can cut lots of them if you want but what I do is layer my fabric and cut them all at once you can cut with one pattern as many as four of these as at once if you cut more than four your fabrics going to kind of shift and your pattern won't be quite so precise so here's the four I've cut okay you've got a layer I'm right side up like this you cannot fold them like this if you do this one will be reversed with the scallops that's not going to make that big a difference but it does make a small difference because as you can see this end and this end are not exactly the same you can't just fold it in two but you know if any if you do it that way in goof don't worry about it there aren't any applicants and if anybody gets close enough to look at it and gripe about it whack them in the head anyway all right now I will will just pin this on I don't iron it on to all four of them or I will iron it on to the top one only and then cut four at once okay I'm only going to cut one here but I can cut four I think you need I don't know whether you need 12 or three one two three four you need nine for the corner blocks and you need 13 to the center blocks okay so now we've got this cut like this and it's not quite as important because it's not a big piece that you have 1/4 inch if you want to measure if you want to draw a fourth inch go ahead but now that you've got that done and you've cut four of them all at once you don't have to have this ironed on in order to draw it especially for something this small you can just lay it on your sandpaper board hold it in place and draw around it because it's a nice small piece and now you've got your scalloped and it's exactly the way the pattern is now what you need is you need to dot in the middle okay and I don't draw the dots a friend of mine named Cherie Ralston who is a brilliant woman what it will tell you to do in the pattern and what you can do is trace all the circles because it'll give you a circle here he is okay these wherever they are here they're our tag sale dots they come in three sizes I know of they come in half inch 3/4 inch or 1 inch and they come on sheets you will find that most of the berries or flower circles in my patterns come in 1/2 inch 3/4 inch or 1 inch because all you have to do now is take this off here put it on the back of your it saves drawing around it and it saves cutting it out so all you have to do now is stick it to the back okay and now when you cut this out or you cut anything that's got paper in the middle that you're going to fold or use around it you cut more of a 3/8 seam inch seam allowance instead of 1/4 because it's got to go around the paper if particularly and I goofed the other day when I was doing some ovals this will work with ovals too although you can't use tech sailboats you have to use regular freezer paper okay here is my needle you put knot in there I do this and I'll do all my dots at once I've got them all cut out I keep them in a little ziploc bag so they're all together that's what that was and then you do a running stitch around the outside because circles if you're just going to applicant are extremely difficult and challenging excuse me challenging Jenni don't told me a long time ago don't say difficult don't say hard take challenging ok they're really challenging I'd call them hard anyway sorry Johnny you just do a running stitch right around here it takes a second but it's a small dot yeah I saw these scallops years ago in Mexican really art especially around the day of the dead things they do they would have a scallop like this they were usually painted they weren't appliquéd but there would be a scallop with a dot in the middle and I thought that was really interesting I've also seen it in a lot of punch needles stuff and I really like the way it frames things the scallops and the dots okay then after you go around it you just pull it comes up around the berry or yeah dot whatever it is and you secure it with the stitch and then you aren't then you sew it to the center with your basic application okay the basic application I use goes in well we don't have to now figure out where to hide the knot on this I'll show you on the grass how to do that but the basic appliqué stitch goes in your needle goes in right behind where you came out you do not put your needle in for the next stitch straight down you do it always at an angle if you do it straight down your stitch will show every time I teach this and somebody has stitches showing they've taken their needle straight down you take it at an angle like this and then you just pull it in the stitch will bury itself in the fabric and you always use thread should it told you this when order to grabbing it you always use thread that matches the item your applique on not the background in other words you'd use red here instead of green okay so we're going to sew that in all the way around we're not going to sew all the grass on but I will show you how to do the same stitch with that every block we do in this quilt will have ground of some kind either grass snow or except for the one with the whales it has water I take that back and quite a few of them have these scallops around the outside okay I think yeah I'm all the way around nice to look at the back and be able to see okay so then you just take your needle to the back and I do a small stitch like that I usually do two of them and then just to make sure the tail doesn't come undone there I take it through and take it to the middle it's harder for the tail to come loose there okay okay so now you've got a scallop but we're going to have scallops that are going to go all the way around there and I will show you how to do that in a second first we'll just start on the grass so you can see that stitch again and how I start it okay need green you notice I use a lot of red and green this is my teeth needle roll I love it Moda just recently did a penny Palooza and all the designers were supposed to show the pin cushions they use and that's the pin cushion I use I really like it because it's got a place for my needles I can put extra thread in here my thimble goes in there and I can just roll it up and take it with me one of the things I like about applique is after you do the prep work during the day yeah I started to say this for those of you who know me you know I'm a real type-a personality you can kind of tell that even if you don't know me by the number of quilts I make and my husband used to say will you please sit down at night and watch TV with me and I'm not very good at just sitting so I developed the my the method of doing applique that does the prep work during the day so at night then I can sit down with my husband and watch TV and applique now there are lots of things that I do that could be done maybe differently if you got up and went to an iron or got up and went and did something in the process so if you want to go ahead and do it that way you go right ahead I just developed this so prep works during the day once I sit down I don't get up again he else a lot he's not mean he just goes do you know it's taking us three hours to watch a one-hour movie and he's usually right okay now you're going to do the basic appliqué stitch on your grass which is going to stay very nicely in place and I'm going to keep from going crazy by trimming all those little things off here because I want you and they're all on my blue pants oh well it's good form makes me feel like I'm at home if I have threads all over okay you you bring your thread in from the back obviously and bury it and you do exactly the same thing we did with our berry you just go in right behind where you came up and the stitches just bury themselves and if you get a nod which I always do somewhere and I always tell people when I teach that if they do something wrong and it doesn't work right and don't be embarrassed show it to me because believe me I know how to fix it because I've already done it myself I can show you as much about what not to do as what to do and one of them is my needle keeps coming undone but I tend to do that I use a 50 or 60 weight cotton thread you want to make sure the color of your thread matches I think I probably will have thread packs on my website to go with this quilt I love silk thread I love the way it feels I love the way it sews but it tends to I tend to have trouble with it knotting that doesn't mean everybody does but I do if you have trouble with the thread knotting and it becomes difficult and annoying use a different thread it's just that simple I find cotton to be the easiest for me to use but even some Cotton's not a lot and so I don't use that brand just use whatever is the best for you okay there now we would just take that and so that all the way along there but you don't have to sit here and watch me so what you can do it yourself it's real easy then just go ahead and pull that basting out after you've done it okay now we've got to put our scallops around here before we start on the main body we need to get this done first and we need to know it's just like quilting when you quilt you don't want to start and stop a lot if you start and stop a lot you have to thread needles you have to not needles you have to yeah so I don't want to have to do that so what I want to do is know where these guys are going to touch each other and we're going to find that out if we just put them like this you see we can't tell we can just guess where that's going to do it and we can't keep sewing because we'd have to sew this thing under so what we do is we baste it under first and you baste it under by just turning it under straight and then turning it like this so we have a point and basically come to think of it we just need a point we don't need to turn that under like that there sorry that was my bad okay do we haven't now we don't have a needle and not in here we need to not okay we're just going to turn under each end we're not going to do the whole thing because all we need to know is where they're going to touch and we can tell that now once we've got that under okay now we'll do the other end and preferably we'll do it with one that's already got it very under but we'll do that and I'll tell you I do a lot of this stuff not not the long pieces here but like these I'll sit in my chair at night with my sandpaper board turned upside down so that the hard part is up and do this because I'll you're going to need to glue them down but a lot of this stuff I do at night too but basically it's really a little easier when you have a table like this and you can just do it at the table or the kitchen counter okay now we've got both ends under we've got dots in the middle and what we can do is now just take these and line them up next to each other so that when we sew we will just start at one end and go like that and then if we've got them like that we'll have them clear across the top too so we'll have a grass done or ground done in this block and then we will have all our scallops on and we will not have done an awful lot of starting and stopping so I think probably if you get all this done you will have made a head start in learning how to do freezer paper and needle turn applique thanks for joining me with this session of the McCall's quilt along remember to get a kit if you want one and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Quilt Videos

Views: 59,848

Rating: 4.8343482 out of 5

Keywords: McCall's Quilt Along, Over the Meadow, Over the Meadow and Through the Year, Block of the Month, Quilt Kits, Hand Applique, Applique, Hand Quilting, Freezer Paper Applique, Quilting Tutorials, Jan Patek, Quilt Alongs, McCall's Quilting

Id: X3uhcF8AnSo

Length: 33min 2sec (1982 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 09 2016