Recently I was blessed enough to be working at one of my quilting retreats and we were
focused that day on my Gears quilt. Now one of my favorite students, Nancy, you know who
you are, came up and said What if we did it in blues and greens and made it a garden theme.
Well Nancy here you go.
We’re going to break today’s project into two different steps. Basically let’s talk
about the background first and then I’m going to walk you through how I made a bunch
of these fun applique shapes. Just using all the templates you already have laying around
your studio, right? So first of all, thank you we’ve got a couple of different fantastic
fabrics out there. So from Northcot I’m using a green pack and a blue pack together,
right? And then from Robert Kaufman I’ve got a solid pack that we’re going to use
as our applique pieces. So what you want to do is I’m going to use two of each of the
blue and two of each of the green. But in the quilt behind me you can probably see some
of the squares have some real high contrast and some of the squares have some real low
contrast in their color, right? So in order to do that we’re going to pair a green with
a blue and a green with a blue from each set. But this first set we’re going to call our
low contrast which means we’re going to pull right from the top and right from the
top. We’re going to join these right sides together. We’re going to go to our sewing
machine and sew around all four sides. I’ll show you more in second, right? But for our
low contrast pile, excuse me, our high contrast pile, the ones that are really jumping around
on the quilt back there. You’re going to take one of your stacks and just flip it over,
just like that. And then that way when you’re pulling your pieces out, you’re going to
pull from the bottom here where the light ones are. And take from the top here where
your dark ones are and join them. So just one blue and one green all the way around.
So through all your pieces and when you’re set with that you’ll have a giant stack
of them that look just like this. And you can see here I’ve stitched with a quarter
inch all the way around. Real easy.
Now one of the tricks I want you to do first is we’re working on a lazy susan mat now
so it’s easy to control my square, is I want to go ahead and gently dogear these cuts.
Now don’t cut all the way through the cross of the threads we’re going to need that
here in a second. But let’s just take these off now so that we don’t have to deal with
them later. This is just some bulk management because we’re going to be building pinwheel
blocks today. Then you take a nice straight edge, lay it right over the cross of the threads.
It doesn’t matter where the corners are, right? Even if they’re in the waste basket.
Now without moving the fabric at all, we’re going to rotate this and we’re going to
do it again, ok? But this time from the other corners. And every two little five inch squares
you should now yield four new half square triangles. And you’ll go to your ironing
board and you’ll go ahead and just press these over to the dark side. So when they’re
all done you’re going to be able to take two units, join a blue and a green together,
right? Blue and green together to start building the beginning half of our block. To finish
the block you’ll need another set of those, right? Now we’ve got options. That is not
what we’re going for. This right here is known as a broken dishes block. We’re not
going for that either. Today, but you could, today we’re going to go for the pinwheel.
And you know you’ve got it correct when you fold these over to go back to your sewing
machine and you’ve got a nice big lump right in the middle of all of your fabric there.
Your machine will go right over it so ust nest those seams. Or pinch it so that the
threads touch each other there. And then just sew that with a quarter inch seam allowance.
And when it’s all done it will look just like that. So what I need you to do is go
through and build all of your stacks, both the low contrast and the high contrast.
And then join me over here at the quilt because I want to kind of walk you through how I handled
all of my colors, right? So starting down at the bottom and I might not even need to
move my stool there. In the bottom area I used primarily the lower contrast, the darkest
blocks possible down in here. And then I kind of drifted them around to the side a little
bit. I wanted the sunlight to be coming through my garden this way. So most of my lighter
and or my higher contrast blocks are also up in the top area. So I do recommend you
do spread out all of your blocks at one point and go ahead and manage them and mix them
all around until you have them just the way you like them. And then from that point on
we’re just going to take them off square by square. And in order to join those, when
you put them together you’ll notice you also get the broken dishes look. So these
will be pinched like this and like this. Go right into the sewing machine, a quarter inch
seam allowance and you will have that quilt top completed in no time, I promise.
Now applique, super fun, right? This is where you get to go wandering around in your tool
shed or in the description below where we’ve got a bunch of the stuff available for you.
We’ve got a bunch of fun templates. Of course you know I’m a big fan of the burst block
template. This one I used to create the big sun flower around here. I used 18. You probably
need that many. You could probably even get away with a few more. And we are dealing with
those basically the easiest way to get them is I just stacked up a few fabrics at once.
Lay your burst block template on the bias from edge to edge. And basically, normally
if we’re piecing with this we can leave these little pinked edges up there. But when
we’re not piecing with it, I’m going to do a little left handy right now. Did I get
it? Oop almost. When we’re not piecing with it we need to get these edges off. So then
I just back my ruler back a little bit, slice, slice. Those are clean. And I have a couple
layers going here. Slice and slice. Ok so now I was able to make several wedges quickly.
And those wedges as you can see in the project, right? They’re just going to lay in here
and start to move their way around the quilt very nicely. . It works very easy that way.
Like I said you’ll need at least 18 to make that size sunflower. And then in the middle
you probably saw I used a fun little 3 ½ inch hexagon template. And that fits right
in here, super simple. But some of the fun also came in with the machine quilting. I’m
hoping you can see that because it gave it a little bit more detail by doing some of
the circles and some of the lines in here. So the entire focus of the applique started
for me in the big sunflower. It was large. It was bright. It helped control a lot of
the design content throughout the rest of the project, right? .
So once I had that position kind of dialed in, and you know I just these on the fly as
I go. I took my scraps and not only did I take my scraps for those but look at this.
I made a huge stack of those burst wedges and all of these other triangles. So then
what I can do is I can take two or three of these at a time like this and I can lay them
underneath something like my medium size orange peel. Now the orange peel, you can actually
fit one of those and one or two of the small. So don’t just plop that right down in the
middle there. I want you to go ahead and move it over to the edge, ok? And I’m going to
be smart. Let’s use our lazy susan. That’s why we have these things, right? And then
for this, it’s the same thing. I’m going to slide it down. Make sure I’ve got plenty
of room to get other pieces. And I’m going to cut around here. But what I am not going
to do is I’m not going to square out that end. I’m going to come up here past this
way. So that I’m starting to create a bit of a sharper tip like you can see down here
also, right? Because petals don’t often have square ends do they? So then I can make
some fun petal shapes like this that work very nicely as well. And with those shapes
and some of the ones made from the smaller shapes, we can start doing all kinds of other
fun stuff, right?
So down here on the quilt, first of all let’s talk about finishing out the sunflower. Following
it down I’ve put in some larger leafs. And those were done by taking one of the medium
size orange peels. I think I just have the bright yellow orange peels right now. But
you get the idea. You can just set those in there. You can add a little bit of character
by setting them off setting if you like. So that’s how I did the leafs down the stem.
We’ll do the stems at the very end. Then the other fun little mini sunflower down here,
it’s not the burst block templates at all. It’s actually that medium sized orange peel.
So you’ll take those and you can just start to layer them around. You can see I’ve got
a couple of not so pretty cuts so I could maybe bring this one around here and I could
hide it with the next one, right? And looking down at that small flower you also see that
put another one of the hexagons in the center with that. But to make it fun and different
I wanted to make it smaller but I only had a 3 ½ inch so what I did then is I just randomly
cut off what looked to be about a quarter inch of each of the six sides. I think I might
have done seven. Perfect. Now it’s a much smaller one and will fit right down in there
for you as well. So that’s how I made a little bit smaller hexagon just by whittling
it down. One of my favorite happy accidents happened right here. I was actually cutting
them and I didn’t realize I didn’t cut all the way through the fold. Now this one
here is actually planted. I didn’t something on one of those small ones. I hope you can
see that down here. But it works great on the big ones too. So these fun ones like this
you can keep it on the fold and then you could take like maybe a brighter one and you could
drop it in here. And then maybe a couple even darker ones in the backside here to kind of
get that look of like a tulip.
So for me the beauty in quilt making comes from experimenting. Comes from designing and
just playing. I get so incredibly excited when I take some real basic shapes and things
and start putting them together and I get this really fun and clever output when it
comes to the shapes like these flowers. So I’m going to encourage you to just look
around and be creative and clever with what you do.
I promised you some stems, right? So let’s talk real quickly about how we could do the
stems. You can use them from your scraps or I did leave my darkest of my brown solid fabrics
available. So that I could come down here and to get the most out of my ten inch square,
I started down at the bottom and I just did a real gradual S cut like that. And than at
the base of the stem it’s going to be wider. And it’s going to come in and gradually
become more narrow as it works its way to the top. So here is a stem that you could
come in and drop into any of your flowers. The big stem for the sunflower, I actually
had to make two or three of them. So then what I would do is go, uh oh well I’m getting
out of control here. So then I just matched this up and kept on cutting to extend out
what becomes a bigger stem. Let me see if I can do that all the way through because
it came off my mat. But I just did that and of course you just need to come in here. And
one of my tricks when I’m splicing applique on applique, no straight lines. So I just
did a random kind of wiggly cut like that so that when I machine quilt over it, it just
goes with the flow of the machine quilting. Time to discuss that as well.
Check this out. Now I already talked about the sunflower and because it’s fused sometimes
it can be a little tricky on the quilting machine itself so I didn’t want to do a
ton of work. But what I did want to do is I wanted to add detail and texture to make
it look like a sunflower here. I added these lines to hold down the applique shapes. And
I also stitched on the lines of the applique shapes themselves to hold them down permanently.
I added a little more character in some of the stems. And over here I added a little
more character in some of the smaller flowers just to bring your eye to them as well. And
then in the background I just basically did a motif that kind of looked like wind swirls,
just nice and open. I used a green variegated thread and you can hardly see it.. It does
still need to be quilted densely. One of the things that could happen to you brand new
machine quilters, so this is a caution, don’t be scared, but a caution. If you quilt all
this from the center as you’ve been taught, thumbs up. But then if you jump down here
before you quilt this space between here, you could get a bit of a pucker on one side.
So I quilted all my appliques first because I’m comfortable with that. But while I was
doing that I spread my hands wide so I had my hand wide here and this hand wide here
to decrease the extra amounts of wadding and batting and puckering that could happen in
here. And it ended up quilting down very nicely. So if you’ve never quilted an applique quilt
first I’m going to still recommend you move from the center outward to prevent any potential
problems. But if this is not your first rodeo, jump in, thread that machine and let’s get
‘er done. And I will see you next time right here at Man Sewing.