Raw Edge Applique | # 2 Intuitive Sewing Basics | Art Quilting | Advanced Tutorial

so today I really wanted to get going with some basic instructions for the raw edge quilting when I did the five basting strategies in the free motion video I felt it would be remiss not to cover pins but for raw edge quilting I don't recommend them when I quilt it's almost like in my mind's eye I see where I'm supposed to go next I see that I'm supposed to curve around this way I see that there's a little branch of leaves over here and then I start to quilt them and I know for myself if I stop to pull a pin I would lose that you want to keep things loose and fluid you want to just keep moving you don't want to stop and regroup any more than you need to to take care of all the other things you need to take care of when you're Raja quilting another thing is that you really can't do this unless you have some facility and ease with free motion quilting and so if you're not confident doing a stimple already I would like you to go back and work on that and here are some ways you can work on it at any level that doesn't require a machine if you just do anything your pencil can do and see how you can get back out of there how you can cover the ground what shapes you do in don't like many of the things you can do with your pencil you can do with your machine and your building will look very much like your drawing once you get really fast at quilting these shapes that are sort of like peacock shapes if we start on the outside of our area and we just come in and I usually do three loops and the last one has a point and I've still headed the same direction I started on the first loop and you can just do that for a while and then when you wanna if I do this I'm going to be heading off my paper and I want to hit it so you swing wide and you come back yet and you can keep going the same direction and then I'm going to do one more here and then I would like to start heading back this direction and so I swing wide and it's hard to remember that quilting something for the first time another way that you can work on your free motion skills that I recommend is to make pot holders and when I say make pot holders because you're going to react to the prints you're using and they're going to cause you to decide to do things a certain way and so when I quilt potholders out of this I tend to start mimicking these leaf shape ok so what I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of mimic that and so I'm gonna go like this and I'm going to quote like this and then I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that I'm not going to Drive myself crazy trying to make it perfect because I've learned that it looks pretty good even if it's kind of imperfect and I'm going to quilt that so then I'm going to come and I'm going to take as my inspiration this little shape here and I'm just doing this as fast as I can while I'm making pot holders I don't do this but like this oh this would look better with a little bit of veining and I'll come back and do a little bit of this and then there's that one and when I'm done my pot holder might look something like this and so this is the reason that making potholders has really informed my quilting because I'm looking at these shapes when I'm doing it and I'm looking at these and these and I'm looking at these fish and I've been a lifelong fan of Paisley and look at these nice sheets okay so we need to set up our machine and whatever you do for your free motion and go ahead and do that you know I've used a size 14 needle for this almost the whole time I'm going to suggest that you just use as many colors of construction thread as you have this is all cotton covered polyester 40 weight thread that is a basic sewing thread such as you would make a blouse out of or a pair of pants if you're unsure of your stitch quality right now you can hide behind threads that blend with your fabric and you can do that when you're starting out and I did that when I first started free motion quilting I almost always matched my thread to my background and I matched my top thread to my bobbin thread at the point where I was doing a contrasting color my top and bottom thread matched at this point I stitch with a top thread that contrasts my fabric as much as possible and I almost always stitch in back with some version of taupe khaki camel now I didn't baste so I like to get this nice and flat and I pay attention because if you quilt a whole bunch with this like this you get pretty frustrated with yourself okay so with this piece one of the first things I want to do is do some broad shapes that are intended to really start quilting this down and cover some ground and so in order to do that I'm going to pick something that is contrasting especially in value to my thread not only in color but in value I want you to be able to see and then I'm going to find the spot that that happened there's family there's a little one there where I skipped one stitch and I'm going to mark those so that I do something about that your ends need to have not very big gaps because if this were a huge if this were a huge gap here that I would need to stitch inside of it because you really want to come close to you don't want to have big areas of your design that aren't attached on the edges and so not only do you need to do that but I like the way these things look if they have another row of stitching left in and so I'm going to go down this side and I don't know if I'll go down that again we'll see what happens the principles of design that always apply apply here as well sometimes with a slightly different take I'm talking about balance and emphasis movement pattern repetition proportion rhythm variety unity contrast value whimsy is one of my favorite one that I love to juxtapose things so that they're whimsical something totally wouldn't expect with some little tumbling chicks some of my favorite things to do do a serious landscape but one of the foreground fabrics is little chicks all different direction sometimes I do a piece where I really want it to be very formal but I still always want there to be an element of surprise something that's unusual through all of this though the main thing is to trust yourself and your reaction to what you're seeing and what you're creating and you know it's okay sometimes to show things to people and see how they react but first really try to get in touch with how you feel about it and then I'm going to move on to this one and I have a ton of stuff picked out for this and no idea what I'm going to do with it now this piece is the one that i cut my background larger so that you can see what it's like if you do that instead of basting I would still face this why I got started but this will give you something to pull through with and keep you away from your needle and this trim it could be completely perfectly square when you're done but I do mine always with an irregular shape okay I'm gonna maybe I kind of like that often with the first layer of this what I do is take something a big scrap like this okay so there are also some general do's and don'ts that I want it to cover see how thick this is and how much it wants to move around and unpleasant fashion that's why I didn't think people would really want to start with this but I wanted to show you it so that you'd see that it's possible one is don't use tiny scraps and put your hands right up to the needle use a larger scrap and your thread tails to pull your piece around from a safe distance tight stitches near the edge of your shapes work the best but you can get as laborat as you have patience for when you stitch off the edge like I just did it can be a little bit traumatic to just the stitch formation that's going on so I actually try to avoid doing that as much as possible I could have cut this down and then it would allow me to see better than the best thing to do is to feel for it I would like you to be a little obsessive about checking tension on the backside of your piece don't only micro focus on your piece if something can look really great to you very close up and then and then if you see it at a distance it's a little bit milquetoast to you prop your piece up against your machine and and go go get a cup of tea and come back and look at it from a distance or if you're not working pin it on your wall your design wall if you have one or even just a place where you're not going you don't mind putting a pin or two in the wall and leave it there so that when you walk by or when you're sitting in your chair you can see how you like it from a distance especially as your pieces get bigger remind yourself not declension to your work and if you have been loosen up you're supposed to enjoy this process and not just let your body get really hunched in and unbalanced because of the way that you've been sewing try to be mindful of those things and hydrate you know this is hard work you're actually leveling up here with your type through motion quilting and so this is work even if you enjoy it even if you're like me and you're having the time of your life it's work and you need water as you go take a piece of chalk I often use play chalk and white chalk and really mark areas where you've done something you don't like so that you remember to fix them before you're done there are lots of ways to fix things and we'll talk about that as we go this is the one I'm actually the most worried about because I've got this very neutral background and I want to make this into some kind of a flower and I'm not positive that I have a good plan a few other things to talk about quickly other aids you might want for this and a lot of them are talked about in the earlier video which I'll throw up on the screen here go back and watch that if you need a refresher on some of this stuff but anyway you might want to wear gloves I don't care for them anymore I wore them all the time in the beginning and went through a lot of different kinds including a lot of $2 gardening gloves from the local hardware store you're gonna want marking tools to mark a little bit especially mistakes or if you're adding a highlight somewhere and you want it to be a heart I will often draw those hearts with a washable marker because we're going to wash everything later you know you can use anything that will wash out but be careful up there are lots of markers that are washable until you heat them up with your iron and then there and you don't want to use something like that spray starch I've only done this once or twice because I use high quality quilting cotton but if I were using some really fussy gauzy apparel type fabrics and trying to work that into my designs I would probably spray those with starch and hit up with my iron and then get those fabrics to behave more like paper which is one of the things rosemary discusses in her book you can also use glue stick I don't use it much for this and I never really did but I used glue stick quite a bit when I first started doing landscapes and I found that if I glued up a big landscape and started working on it everything pulled off and was falling all over the place by the time I got very far and so if you're gonna glue you might like glue a few things that you're gonna do the next morning and then and then do those once it's dry but because we layer as we go and we work over the top of stuff it's sort of hard to do that with this it's better I think to just get good at controlling your fabric so again I'm not going to be using a lot of this stuff but I did in the beginning okay we're going to trim as we go and we want to trim between 1/8 and up to 3/16 and eights kind of better we don't want to go below that things will start to rip out we're going to have to stitch those an extra time are to really close to the cutting edge if we've accidentally cut that close or some other way fix that so that it's not going to just be all falling apart after the first wash it'll be ratty and we'll trim that up and clean it up but we don't want it to be actually falling apart if you don't have a pair of these curved tip embroidery scissors that I use and I couldn't do this without them there's so they respond so well to small movements and allow you to really really get in and cuttings good things clothes and all of that I I wouldn't even try to do this without these you could probably get used to doing it with your big dress making shears but I personally I would accidentally cut things lighted me too constantly that way you do have to be careful with these it is easy to poke a hole and get going on a hole and it is easy to to do other kinds of mistakes but once you're used to these they will really help you get the results you want don't stitch long straight lines that follow the grain of your fabric because again we're if you have a straight line you want it to sort of follow the bias of your fabric so that once you trim it it doesn't just keep losing threads off the edge and fraying off the edge and fraying off the edge until it basically passes your stitching line it's no longer attached to your piece ok so last night I made some little plans on how to go forward with my three little pieces and so we'll just see if I follow through with this or if I go under Corrections now I'm going to begin filling in my mid ground I want to enhance my design I favor organic shapes sometimes I do graphic ones for fun sometimes I like to mix it up I spoke to my daughter and on this one I'm actually going to add some kanji characters for water and fire towards the end with the next step but for now I'm adding three leaves I've decided to do them in different fabrics I'm stitching with yellow thread here for emphasis I recommend that you switch thread a lot so that you have interest close-up and something for the eye to look at and all that variation during this process you'll be finding your own motifs and you'll find that you do the same shapes over and over and that with time they get more sophisticated and later we will go through more layers of fabric but for right now just stick to the background layer than the mid-ground layer and then your accent layer on the top because it's hard to minimize puckering until you sort of get used to doing it and then you get to where you can go through a lot of layers and create some really interesting effects so I do recommend that you trim away enough so that you minimize overlap in the center or other overlapping parts of your design often when I find that my line is a little too straight and a little too straight on the grain I will just cut the line a little Wiggly and that helps compensate a lot for that especially if you know after it's washed if I like the look of that you could resort to satin stitching certain elements down I I don't do that and you'll just get used to this idea of working with a loose piece of fabric and drawing with your needle you're really only limited by your imagination there has been method to my madness here and I think you'll see here what I'm talking about and why I recommend that you do watch the earlier tutorials even if you're not going to make them I really have been trying to build skills with everyone so that they're ready to take these things on if you're an advanced free motion quilt er I think you can skip a lot of this but if it's sort of new to you or if you've never been very satisfied with the whole process I recommend that you watch some of those earlier videos because we're trying to build an attitude about our sewing as well as technique I like to stitch flowers a lot on the things I make and there are several sort of habitual flowers that I do this is one of them when I did my sketch I decided to add a little bit more of this gray area and so that's what I'm doing here I discover in a few minutes that I am NOT stitching the same way that I did earlier but I decided that it's going to still look nice and so I'm just going to trim it out and keep it this way the main thing with this is to just have fun and play not drive yourself crazy feeling like there's some way it's supposed to be there aren't any mistakes if it if you like it and if it's well made if it's beautiful this fabric is one that I've used for years I've only got about half a yard of it left but it's one of my very favorite fabrics I feel like it's things on everything I ever put it on one of the things that I've noticed when I do this is that sinuous lines seem to be better than sharp zigzagging shapes which tend to cause pile ups especially with a fast machine like mine and if you're hesitant about free motioning again please don't go through too many layers try to keep it to your your sandwich and then three layers on top of it later we're going to be looking at how we can fix the mistakes that we've been marking along the way as well as embellishments that will just add that little certain something that we like we want sort things to pop we want certain things to Sparkle we just want everything to be visually interesting and create whatever feeling we're going for with our work so don't forget about buttons and beads and ribbons and lace and embroidery and any other embellishing tactic that you love and can add later these are only limited by your imagination I'm not going to show that much in the stitching on my little round flower table mat that I'm making because this really isn't something that I think anyone else will be able to jump right in on if you were able to I think you could probably do this without any instruction from me the video is going to be pretty long as it is so I'm just going to show you this at stages if you decided to do a mat for your table with one layer of batting whether it's round or square just do whatever you would like to whether it's a floral set up like the tea cosy with one or three or five flowers or whether it's just some different shapes covering your bat round or square and in the last video we'll talk about different ways to finish that up including the binding that we've already done the previous video this flower is very similar to a bigger five petal flower that I've made a lot and I know that this will look nice under my vase on my table what I don't know is it will look like any kind of a flower I'm going to add elements to the foreground color highlights refine my composition a little bit as well as make some repairs I could have had my leaves go over my two little areas of skip stitches earlier but I didn't instead I'm going to add some little circles which I like to do and these will bring in the teal that is sort of in the inside lining of this tea cosy and I think I'm going to do my stipple at the end with a teal colored thread as well to kind of bring that color in close-up on the trivet I'm going to add a number of large teal circles and a few small ones scattered around I'm not sure how much I like this one so far it doesn't seem bright enough to me because my reddish background is so subdued and so I may have to introduce another bright color at some point but for now I'm just going to add all this teal and see how I like that I generally don't do a lot of embellishing that adds additional depth such as beating and stuff to the trivets but he definitely could do that you could add trims and things you could do paint there are a lot of things you can do to add as well as to cover up mistakes I really didn't have anything on this one that bothered me very much and so I didn't mark anything I like to flip my piece over and clean my back up as I go the more threads you have back there they're getting ratty and sewn down the more time it takes later on it's easier in my opinion to just take a minute now and then and just really clean up your back and your other areas you can also catch on a thread when you're quilting and and quilted in pretty good to where you have to pick it out and I just like to clean it up as I go I do like it I just wish it were a little brighter now I'm going to do something on the center of this flower again I'm unsure whether I'm going to like this as a flower but for now I think I'll put a Center in it there will be an accent I think that I may need to add a little bit of green when I do my binding as well as do a little shaping so that it suggests petals the way that a poppy does before I like this I really don't know where I'm going to go with this and but I have an idea that I'm going to add some satin stitching the way that I like to do so that it kind of looks like flower parts coming off of the center and I'll probably do that with red variegated thread and I don't know how many things I have that I want to fix on this one I haven't marked anything there's nothing that I really thought was a huge issue and so I may have very little to actually prepare as I go I do have a few startup circles in my dark dark green quilting that I think are kind of a monkey-looking and so I'll probably try to go over those a little bit what I do buy satin stitching very quickly I'm going to show you how I do the final quilting and add a few little stitched elements so that I make things pop a little and look the way I like and add the dimension that I like during this phase I'm usually imagining beading that I might do later or other kinds of things I might want to bring in but after I do this the next thing I'm going to do is wash it and dry it very well in the dryer and then I'm going to clean it up using a lint roller and my little scissors to trim off all the ratty parts and just get it looking nice so in the next video we'll take a look at those pieces and make them into whatever they're going to be ultimately and add any last little bells and whistles that we want to to our design you

Channel: Zazu's Stitch Art

Views: 105,267

Rating: 4.9231191 out of 5

Keywords: Free-motion quilting, free motion, quilting, free, motion, raw-edge, applique, raw edge, sewing, intuitive, creative, art quilting, fiber art, fiber, zazu, zazu's, stitch, art, beth uda, helena, Montana, MT, random applique

Id: uu-ZFCLccYY

Length: 28min 36sec (1716 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2016