Keeping Up With the Gretchens: Hand Stitching vs Bernina B990 Invisible Machine Appliqué Experiment for Stonefields Blocks

Good morning and Happy Sunday, everyone!  After my reckless but ultimately successful experiment on my Deco quilt last week (read about it in this post, which I edited and updated after coming back to the quilt and realizing that all was well after all), I decided to conduct another Mad Scientist Experiment on my Stonefields quilt project.  You may have heard of Keeping Up With the Joneses or Keeping Up With the Kardashians, but I'm all about trying to keep up with my blogging friend Gretchen who is cruising through her Stonefields quilt and leaving me behind in the dust!  Just kidding; I am delighted that Gretchen, Chris, and Hanne were all successfully cajoled into starting or resuming their Stonefields quilts (pattern by Susan Smith available here) as a very informal quilt along with me.  I know it's not a race, but I must be the slowest stitcher ever to have threaded a needle and it can be discouraging to put in so many hours and see so little progress -- especially since there are so many challenging and intense quilts that I want to make (I am thinking of YOU, Star Upon Stars, Down the Rabbit Hole, Simple Folk, and Happy Days!).  Behold my design wall with Blocks 1-12 completed.  Block 13 is another appliqué block that is prepped and ready for hand stitching in the coming days.  (This post contains affiliate links).

Completed Month One Blocks for Stonefields Quilt, One More to Go

Earlier in the week, out of mild curiosity, I timed how long it took me to stitch the 3 1/2" diameter cheddar print circle in one of my Pomegranate blocks.  Wanna take a guess?  

Hand Stitching a Pomegranate Block for Stonefields

It took one hour and seven minutes for me to stitch down that circle.  That was uninterrupted continuous stitching, not including threading the needle, trimming away the backing fabric, and not including stitching the light blue orange peel shape that I've started on in the photo.  No wonder I'm not able to keep up!  I am the snail of stitching!  

Then I started doubting my hand stitching practices (again).  If it's taking me so much longer, I must be doing something wrong, right?  Am I making my stitches too small?  

Detour -- First, internet research.  Then old fashioned research, consulting each of the appliqué books in my personal library and digging out class notes from workshops in a silly attempt to determine the "correct" stitches per inch of hand stitched appliqué.  Well, guess what -- there is NO consensus.  Erin Russek's tutorial says to aim for 10-12 stitches per inch.  Becky Goldsmith suggests "longer than 1/16" but shorter than 1/8" in her hand stitched applique tutorial for Piece O Cake.  And then I found this highlighted stitch count guide chart in my favorite Gold Standard how-to-hand-applique book, Simply Successful Applique by Jeanne Sullivan, and I realized that my current autopilot hand appliqué stitch length is exactly what I was striving for when I set out to learn this craft 12 years ago.  And yes, I know for sure it was 12 years ago because when I popped over to Amazon to get you that link, Amazon told me "Paperback purchased July 24, 2013."  So really, this is all Jeanne Sullivan's fault!  😉

Aha!  Jeanne Sullivan Taught Me to Make Tiny Stitches!

Before I go any further with this discussion, I want to make clear that I am not the Quilt Police.  I delight in the opportunity to experience creative works made by others and I am definitely not whipping out a ruler at a quilt show or a sit-and-sew to measure other people's stitch length and judge their work inferior if their stitches aren't as tiny as mine.  I greatly admire Erin Russek and Becky Goldsmith and I learned a lot from each of them.  Back in 2013, I was hooked on Esther Aliu's blog and I was in awe of the mind-blowing, magnificent hand applique work that would be shared in Esther's WIPs On Wednesday linky party.  I admired Esther's incredibly intricate Love Entwined 18th century reproduction pattern and wanted to acquire the skill necessary to tackle that level of complexity.  I bought Jeanne Sullivan's book because it was the one Esther recommended on her blog and I now remember that I did a lot of my earliest hand stitching with that book on my lap opened to the stitch chart, deliberately trying to work towards those tiny stitches.  I tried to speed up my hand stitching by making bigger stitches, but as Jeanne promised in her book, "...It will actually become difficult for you to sew larger stitches after you learn to execute the smaller ones."  When I try to make my applique stitches larger they become more irregular and I don't enjoy the hand stitching process nearly as much.  So I am going to keep on doing "me" (tiny stitches that feel relaxing and wonderful to create) and you should keep on doing "you" (whatever stitch length is working and enjoyable for you).  

Okay, so my tiny stitches are taking too long, but they are NOT "too small" or "wrong," I like making them tiny, and I'm not willing to try and make bigger ones.  However, I want to finish several large, complex appliqué projects in this lifetime.  What's a girl to do?

The Grand Applique Experiment

Per the Stonefields pattern, I had prepped two identical "Willie's Birthday" blocks for appliqué, one in a lime green Tilda print fabric and the other in a brownish Tilda print fabric.  I decided to conduct an experiment, stitching one block by hand as I usually do, stitching the other block by machine on my new Bernina B990.  I timed myself with a stop watch for both blocks and stitched each one from start to finish with no breaks.  The hand stitched block took me two hours and 47 minutes with my usual 100 wt YLI silk thread, approximately 18 stitches per inch.  I was able to stitch the exact same block on my B990 in THIRTY minutes from start to finish and the finished blocks look nearly identical.  You guys, that is a time savings of over 84%.  With my B990 I can completely stitch 5 1/2 appliqué blocks in the time it takes me to stitch just one block by hand.  My mind is blown.  Seriously.  Because, in order to stitch invisible appliqué with any accuracy by machine, you have to run the machine so slowly that it doesn't feel like you're saving much time over hand stitching at all.  I never would have believed I could stitch slowly for accuracy and still save that much time with my sewing machine if I hadn't actually timed myself.

 

Stonefields Willie's Birthday Block, Sewn By Machine in 30 Minutes

This is my first attempt at machine appliqué since upgrading to the Bernina B990 sewing machine and it is the best-looking machine appliqué I have ever done.  It looks nearly identical to my hand stitched appliqué, aside from the larger needle holes created by the Schmetz Microtex 60/8 machine needle compared to the super skinny Bohin size 12 Applique needle I use to stitch by hand, but those needle holes will close right up when I wash the finished blocks to remove my starch and basting glue prior to assembling the quilt top.  In fact, the only way I can tell from the front that it was machine stitched is that, if I'd done this block by hand, I would have had to choose a blender thread color for this print and you'd be able to see my tiny hand stitches where the thread didn't match the color of the fabric print.  You can see that if you look closely at the zoomed-in photo below.  My hand stitched block is at the top, sewn with 100 wt YLI silk thread, and the sample at the bottom is stitched by machine with 100wt clear monofilament thread that doesn't show up against any of the colors in the fabric print:

Hand Stitching Above, Machine Stitching Below

 

The most exciting thing to me is that I was able to customize my machine's invisible appliqué stitch (in the quilting menu) by not only decreasing the length and width, but also by editing the stitch using Bernina's Stitch Designer feature to delete three of the four straight stitches between the zigzag "swing" bites.  That resulted in fewer needle penetrations to the background fabric around the edge of the applique and a less bulky stitch on the back of my block, even after I'd drastically reduced the stitch width to .6 and the stitch length to 1.5.  I saved my new version of the stitch in my Personal folder, naming the file "InviAppli Perfect" (love that we can name our stitches now to remember what they are for).  Next time I sit down to stitch some machine applique I'll be able to recall this stitch with all of my adjustments already made and get right to the stitching.

Saved for Instant Recall!

By the way, I just thought of a workaround for anyone whose machine doesn't have stitch editing capabilities, or doesn't have a built-in invisible machine appliqué stitch at all.  Most of today's computerized sewing machine models, even the mid priced and entry level ones, have a feature that allows you to string different stitches together for stitching.  On Bernina machines it's called Combi Mode and in the tutorials they demonstrate using it to string together alphabet letters like "MIKE" that could be stitched out over and over onto all of Mike's underwear over before he goes off to summer camp, or with decorate stitches like hearts, flowers and leaves that you might want to stitch out in a repetitive pattern to decorate linens, garments, or other projects.  That same feature could be used to create a combination of one zigzag stitch with however many straight stitches you wanted in between and, if your machine has a Memory function for saving stitch combinations, you could save your DIY invisible machine appliqué stitch in that folder.

Side By Side Comparison: Left Block Stitched By Machine, Right Block Stitched By Hand

Note that, when I stitched the Willie's Birthday block pictured above left, I was using an adjusted stitch with two straight stitches between "bites", a slightly wider stitch width of .7, and a stitch length of 2.8.  That put my swing bite stitch spacing at about 10 SPI, which is perfectly adequate to secure the appliqué and approximates the look of a hand stitched block with 10 hand stitches per inch.  I went back in and fine-tuned my machine stitch to more closely resemble my personal hand stitching after I sewed that block, but those original settings I was using would be great for anyone whose hand stitching is around that 10 SPI benchmark.  Further note that when I say "resembles the hand stitching," y'all should be rolling your eyes at me because I'm sewing with invisible thread and, like I said before, once this is washed and quilted no one will be able to see ANY of these stitches anyway.  I gotta be me, right?

 Excuse me briefly while I dance around the room.

*****

 

Okay, I'm back now.  For any others out there interested in invisible machine applique that looks like it was stitched impeccably by hand, and as a reminder to Future Rebecca, here's what I did:

 

• My appliqué shapes were prepared ahead of time with preturned edges using the "starch and press" method, heat resistant plastic templates and Niagara Original Spray Starch Plus to wet the seam allowance (sometimes I use Mary Ellen's Best Press instead), and my Rowenta travel iron to press the seam allowances back over the edge of the template shape.  Then I glue basted them to my block with tiny dots of Roxanne's Glue Baste It along the turned seam allowances.
• No stabilizer used under the block background.  Test first with your fabrics; I found that the starch in my prepared appliqué shapes was sufficient to prevent any puckering or tunneling issues.
• YLI Wonder 100 wt. nylon invisible monofilament thread in the needle (using up my last spool of this thread and will switch to Aurifil's nylon invisible monofilament thread that sews so nicely in my long arm machine), Microtex size 60/8 needle (manually threaded as the eye is too small for the automatic needle threader)
• Superior Threads Microquilter 2-ply 100 wt polyester thread in Cream (closest match to my background fabric) on my bobbin, wound only about 1/3 full and using slower winding speed.  Regular black bobbin case.  This thread might be harder to find as it was made for and marketed primarily for extremely dense long arm quilting such as the "sand" background quilting fill you might see in a custom show quilt.  If your LQS doesn't have it, it's worth seeking out on Etsy or from other online shops.  I have not seen anyone else using Microquilter in the bobbin with monofilament thread in their needle (yet!), but I'm glad I tried it because it really reduces the bulk of those machine stitches significantly, like the stitches are just melting into the fabric weave.  As a hand stitcher and reluctant machine appliqué initiate, the Microquilter bobbin thread created a much more acceptable "hand stitched" look and feel than any of the 50 or 60 weight threads I tried.
• After comparing my machine stitched samples with my hand stitched blocks, I ended up with a preferred machine stitch width of .70 and stitch length 1.5 for the entire combination (that's with three of the straight stitches already removed from the default version of this stitch in Stitch Designer).  That spaces the machine stitched swing "bites" 1.5 mm apart, which is about how far my hand appliqué stitches are spaced when I'm not thinking too much about it and just sewing on autopilot.  Anyone else out there wanting to mix hand stitching and machine stitching in the same project, I suggest you experiment and adjust your machine stitches to approximate your own personal hand stitching as closely as possible rather than just matching the settings that I or any other quilter uses on their machine.
• Pulled up bobbin thread at the start and pulled all threads to the back of the work to tie off after stitching.  Those automatic machine securing stitches and auto trim features are not worth the time savings (to me) because I can see them and feel them.
• Finally, I should acknowledge that the preparation involved is time consuming regardless of whether you're stitching your applique by hand or by machine, and it's really the preparation that makes or breaks your end result.  It's worth taking your time to create accurate templates, choose fabric combinations that please you, get those edges turned under smoothly and each shape positioned just right on your block before you begin stitching.  Fusible raw edge applique is a different story altogether, but with turned edge applique it's always going to be a "slow stitching" project regardless of whether you're stitching with a hand needle or a sewing machine.

Back Side of Machine Stitched Applique, Microquilter 100 wt Bobbin Thread

Ignore those little pieces of ripped paper on the back of the block.  I used my lightbox to position the applique shapes when I glue basted them to the block background, and in some spots the glue went through to the paper pattern underneath and ripped off a little "skin."  Those will come right off when I wash the block to remove the starch and basting glue.  

And how am I loving my Bernina B990 for this technique?  Oh let me count the ways!

• Stitch Designer is a game-changer, giving me nearly as much control over how the sewing machine stitches applique as I have over how my hand stitches are formed and spaced for applique.  I'm going to save a second version of this stitch with only one stitch between the swing "bites" so I can toggle to closer spaced applique stitches when I'm going around a tight curve or for smaller shapes.

Camera Feature Helps to Position Work at Start of Stitching

Blue Dot: Next Stitch Will Land on Background, Right Next to Applique

• I used the Camera feature on my B 990 as I was beginning the applique.  In the past, after selecting and adjusting my appliqué stitch and pulling up my bobbin thread, I tended to get bad stitches right off the bat because I wasn't sure whether the machine was going to start with a straight stitch in the background fabric or a bite stitch in the applique.  Seeing a "security camera" view of what I was about to start sewing on my sewing machine screen, with the stitch pattern right on top of that image, made it very clear to me exactly how the work needed to be repositioned and whether or not I needed to press "pattern begin."  Because of the camera feature, I had no mess-ups requiring me to stop and unpick stitches and start over, removing a lot of the frustration I'd experienced with machine appliqué in the past.

Red Laser Shows Next Needle Penetration, Aiding Accuracy Throughout Stitching

• The other feature I love for machine appliqué is the Laser that shines a dot of red light indicating the next needle penetration, just BEFORE the needle goes down.  I don't feel like this feature is explained very well in the literature and marketing for this machine.  For stitching like invisible machine applique, this is a game changer that prevents you ever having a stitch land where it doesn't belong, detracting from the appearance of what you've worked so hard to create.  No more guessing whether or how much you need to pivot, no more guessing whether one more stitch will fit before you reach that corner.  Bernina ought to be saying "THROW AWAY YOUR SEAM RIPPERS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!  THE LITTLE RED LASER HAS ARRIVED!"  
• One more point that nearly went without saying since I'm spoiled by years of enjoying sewing on Bernina machines: I had to make ZERO tension adjustments to this stitch; the default tension for the invisible machine applique stitch was calibrated perfectly for the 100 wt invisible monofilament thread in my needle with 100 wt Microquilter polyester thread in my bobbin.  The vertical spool pins on my B 990 delivering the slippery monofilament thread up from the top of the little cone instead of sideways is absolutely ideal for best performance.  So many quilters get turned off to monofilament thread because it snarls and breaks in their machines, but not in my Bernina.So in the photos, the lime green Tilda print block was stitched on my B 990 and I tried to get photos showing you how the Camera and Laser features helped me out, because I thought those were dumb gimmicks when I first heard about them.  Like, who needs a laser or a camera on their sewing machine anyway?!  Apparently, ME!  The brownish Tilda print block in the photos is the one I stitched by hand using 100 wt silk thread in a beigey brown color.  I tried to show you in close ups how, with multicolored prints like these, the invisible thread used for machine stitching makes for more invisible stitches than are possible when stitching by hand, unless I had been willing to switch thread colors from brown to blue to white depending on which color in the print landed at the edge of the appliqué shape.  I am not above such persnicketiness but wanted to sew the block continuously in one thread color from start to finish to make a fair time comparison between methods.  Obviously it would have taken me even longer than two hours and forty-five minutes if I was constantly stopping to knot off, bury thread tails, and switch thread colors around every shape.  I also included a photo showing you what the back side of my finished machine stitched applique looks like, because I am as delighted with the back as I am with the front.  When I've tried invisible machine appliqué in the past I've either used 60 wt Mettler cotton thread in the bobbin (Harriet Hargrave's workshop) or monofilament thread in the bobbin (Karen Kay Buckley's workshop).  The 60 weight thread creates a bulky ridge on the back side that I didn't like.  Monofilament thread has clear benefits for this technique in the needle, but I love how the 100 wt Microquilter thread in the bobbin is so soft, sinking into the fabric weave, looking and feeling so much like hand sewn work.
   
  Does this mean I'm giving up hand stitching for good?  Heck, no!  I love the portability of hand appliqué for grab-and-go sewing on the couch, on an airplane, or wherever.  I just get discouraged sometimes when I'm not making as much progress as quickly as I wanted to.  Really tiny or intricate appliqué shapes would be easier to stitch by hand, and dimensional appliqué like stuffed berries would still be better stitched by hand so that stitches can be placed at an angle.  Now I know that, with my B 990, I can pick up some slack by doing some of the appliqué by hand when it suits me, but other blocks or even just a few of the shapes within a block can be stitched by machine when that's more convenient.  The machine work looks good enough that no one, and I mean NO ONE -- not even the Quilt Police! -- will be able to tell which appliqué was done by machine once the quilt is finished.
   
  YAHOO!
  
  
  I have only one appliqué block left to stitch for Stonefields Month One, the Posy block.
  
  

  

  Stonefields "Posy Pot" Block 13, Ready for Hand Stitching

  
  
  
  
  
  I was tempted to stitch this one by machine this morning, but then I considered how sad I would be tonight, sitting on my couch next to my husband without any hand stitching in my fingers at all.  I'm going to savor this block for hand stitching.  However, I read through the Stonefields Month Two patterns and I've already identified which blocks I want to stitch by hand and which ones I might stitch by machine.  It's wonderful to have these options!  
  
  
  Here we are at the end of August already.  How did I do on my August goals?  Well, my goals were to make progress on custom quilting my Deco quilt  ✅, get that baby quilt quilted for Carrie ✅, and get some Stonefields appliqué blocks prepped for hand stitching on my trip to North Carolina ✅.  I'm three for three!  In this last week of August I hope PLAN to stitch that last Posy Pot block of Stonefields Month One and resume the custom quilting slog on my Deco quilt.  I also plan to find time to catch up on everyone else's blog posts because I've fallen behind and I can't wait to see what all of you have been up to.
  
  
  Question of the day for the Weary Faithful who stuck with me to the end of yet another overly long blog post: Have you ever done invisible "hand-look" appliqué by machine?  What do you do differently from me?  Do you use other notions or products I should know about?  And for those who do both hand stitched and machine stitched applique projects, how do you select which projects you will hand stitch and which ones to stitch by machine?  Have you ever finished a project and regretted that you stitched it by machine instead of by hand?
  
  
  I'm linking up today's post with the following linky parties:

  ONE MONTHLY GOAL

  Anne-Marie at Stories From the Sewing Room

  MONDAY

  Design Wall Monday at Small Quilts and Doll Quilts  

  Monday Musings at Songbird Designs  

  TUESDAY

  To-Do Tuesday at Quilt Schmilt  

  WEDNESDAY

  Wednesday Wait Loss at The Inquiring Quilter

  THURSDAY

  Needle and Thread Thursday at My Quilt Infatuation  

  FRIDAY

  Finished or Not Friday at Alycia Quilts

  Off the Wall Friday at Nina Marie Sayre

  Beauty Pageant at From Bolt to Beauty

   TGIFF Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday, rotates, schedule found here: TGIF Friday

  SUNDAY

  Frédérique at Quilting Patchwork Appliqué

  Slow Stitching Sunday at Kathy's Quilts

  Oh Scrap! at Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework