Good morning, my lovelies! I have been having so much fun prepping my Stonefields Month One appliqué blocks this week! You know, digging through scrap bins and working with scissors and something suspiciously similar to Elmer's School Glue to put these little blocks together makes me feel like I've been transported across space and time back to kindergarten arts and crafts. It's magical and so cathartic. If you are someone who admires appliqué from a distance but thinks "I'd never have the patience," I urge you to give it a try sometime. It is so much like those school projects from decades ago where we dug through old catalogs and wallpaper sample books and construction paper scraps from other projects, cutting things out with our safety scissors (we were fussy cutting!) and trying to eat the paste when the teacher wasn't looking. I know of no other pastime that can make me forget my arthritis and my wrinkles, dissolve all the cares of the world, and make me feel like a 5-year-old again.
Here are my Stonefields Blocks 5-13, prepped and ready for stitching:
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| Stonefields Blocks 5-13, Prepped and Ready to Stitch |
When I say that my blocks are "prepped and ready for stitching," I mean that I've made heat resistant plastic templates for all of the applique shapes, selected the fabrics, traced the shapes onto the wrong side of my fabric scraps with a pencil, cut the shapes out with an eyeballed scant 1/4" turning allowance, and preturned those seam allowance/turning allowances by wetting them with starch and pressing them back over the edges of the heat resistant templates. Then I used the pattern sheets and a light box to position the applique shapes on my background fabric and basted them in place temporarily using tiny dots of Roxanne's Glue Baste-It (this post contains affiliate links). I put those drops of glue about an eighth to a sixteenth inside the edge of the patch so I won't be hand stitching through the glue. By the way, this preparatory process is exactly the same regardless of whether I was planning to stitch the shapes down by hand or with my sewing machine using an invisible appliqué stitch. If sewing by machine I would just need to slip scraps of tearaway embroidery stabilizer beneath each block before stitching to prevent puckering. I'm not going to promise that there won't be any machine stitched applique on this quilt, but for now I'm going to stitch my applique by hand using my favorite YLI 100 wt Silk thread and my Bohin size 12 Applique Needles. I love how these thin needles and thread create truly invisible stitches that just sink into my fabric and disappear.
It's very difficult to draw and cut out a perfectly round and smooth circle with scissors and the circle is such a common shape in appliqué work that it's very useful to have a set of various size circle templates ready to go when you need them. Today I'm reviewing two commercially available template systems for creating circles for appliqué, Karen Kay Buckley's Perfect Circles and Applipops. Sadly, no one is paying me for this review and I didn't get free product to try out or anything like that. I purchased both products after reading about them in various other people's blog posts and tutorials years ago and this Stonefields project was a great opportunity to use both methods side by side for comparison. I've used KKB's Perfect Circles in the past but this was my first time using the Applipops templates, for reasons I will get to in a moment.
Karen Kay Buckley's Perfect Circle Templates
Perfect Circle templates were designed by master quilter Karen Kay Buckley (read her bio here on The Quilt Show web site if you're not familiar with her work). Perfect Circle templates are made from a thin heat resistant plastic material very similar to the sheets of 8 1/2" x 11" heat resistant plastic that we use to make our own templates for starch and press prepared edge appliqué.
How it works: You trace around the Perfect Circle template on the wrong side of your patch fabric and cut it out with an eyeballed quarter inch seam allowance added in. Then you hand sew a running stitch through the seam allowance with a regular weight cotton thread, pull up the gathering stitches with the circle template inside, wet the gathered seam allowance with liquid starch, and plop your iron on top of the circle (set to MEDIUM heat) to dry the starch.
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| With Perfect Circles, You Hand Sew a Running Stitch to Gather the Seam Allowance |
It takes only a few seconds for the completed circle to cool, and then you loosen the gathering thread to remove the template, pull the thread tail to tighten it up again, and give the finished circle one last press with the iron.
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| Making Appliqué Circles with KKB Perfect Circles Templates |
This is the method I have used for making circles in the past, and I used these templates for making stuffed berries as well. Perfect Circles work on all kinds of cotton quilting fabrics that I've tried from the thick ones to the thinner ones, and the resulting fabric circles come out accurately sized and ready to stitch to my projects. If you buy the Perfect Circles set along with the Bigger Perfect Circles set, as I did, you have 25 different circle sizes to choose from and it's unlikely you will ever need a size for which you don't have a template.
Applipops
Applipops are a newer offering promising perfectly round and accurate circles for appliqué with preturned edges and I bought them at least eight years ago when I first heard about them. Applipops were designed by quilter Ellen Rosenbach and the biggest advantage of using them is that the step of hand sewing a running stitch through the seam allowance is eliminated. Applipops are sets of concentric, nesting metal washers. Each washer fits snugly inside the next larger one when a piece of fabric is "hooped" between the two as shown below.
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| Fussy Cutting with Applipops |
You don't even have to trace your circle onto your fabric with Applipops. You just put the larger ring on the right side of your fabric, the smaller ring on the wrong side, and push them together like putting fabric into a tiny embroidery hoop. Then you trim away the excess fabric with a scissors to a rough quarter inch, brush liquid starch on the seam allowance from the back side, and use the tip of your iron to coax the seam allowance to the center.
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| Two Applipops Circles After Pressing |
Yes, this method is potentially faster, but there are some downsides. First, the reason I have owned the Applipops templates for so long without ever using them is that they only come in a set of 8 sizes (compared to 25 sizes of Perfect Circles templates) and every time in the past that I wanted to use Applipops, I couldn't because the circle I needed for my pattern was not a size included in the Applipops set. Major drawback! For my Month One Stonefields appliqué blocks, there were 5 different circle sizes in my pattern and only one of those circles corresponded with an available Applipops circle template. I was only able to use Applipops to create the "flowers" for my Posy Pot block.
Second, although the outer Applipops ring does a good job of holding the smaller template in place during pressing, it still takes a bit of fiddling around with your iron to get the seam allowance pressed in nice and smooth like you see above. The metal rings get REALLY HOT when you put an iron on them, so there is a greater risk of burning yourself with Applipops than with the heat resistant plastic templates. I used tools like a stiletto and an orange stick (like you'd use for a manicure) to manipulate the seam allowances without getting my fingertips too close to the hot metal rings or to the iron. I didn't time myself, but I suspect that the time I saved not tracing and stitching around a Perfect Circles template was lost again as I fiddled around with the seam allowance manually like a game of fingertip Hot Potato with the red-hot Applipop circles. Once you've drawn up the gathering thread on Perfect Circles templates all the work of arranging the seam allowance into neat little pleats is done.
Third drawback is the thickness of the Applipops aluminum templates resulting in a thick raised edge to the finished circle shapes, as shown below:
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| Applipops Circles Have A Thick, Raised Edge |
An Applipops Troubleshooting YouTube video from the manufacturer acknowledged this issue and talked about "pinching around the edges" of the finished circle to flatten it. In my experience, finger pinching did not work to flatten the Applipops circles and I had to flatten them with my iron after removing the template. On all three of my Applipops circles, this resulted in my circle finishing slightly larger than the template:
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| Applipops Circles Finish Slightly Larger Than Intended |
That size difference may or may not matter for your pattern, and may or may not be a big deal to you depending on how picky you are (I am super picky!). The biggest deal breakers for me with Applipops are the limited size range and the higher risk of burning my fingers, since a badly burned finger can really slow you down and make a hand stitching project a lot less pleasant. To whom would I recommend Applipops? I think they are great for my quilting friends who really despise hand sewing and are turned off by having to stitch the gathering thread for the Karen Kay Buckley method. The size discrepancy between the finished fabric patch and the template is very small and won't matter for most patterns, and a determined quilter using this method would probably get faster and more efficient with pressing the fabric allowance inward than I was on my first try with Applipops. However, since I prefer my Karen Kay Buckley circles, I'll be looking for a new home for my Applipops!
Deco Custom Quilting Continues
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| So Fine Thread in Teal on Kona Solid Indigo Background Fabric |
These are digital designs and this has been really good for experimenting with the different editing and placement tools for custom quilting in my Bernina Q-Matic software. I love the transformation of this row of plain navy blocks!
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| Completed Row of Digital Quilting Designs |
My process now is that I'm doing the SID (Stitch in the Ditch) quilting on seam lines between blocks, then the SID in the log cabin seams and the checkerboard-like blocks as I progress down the quilt, but I'm rewarding myself by stitching the fancy computerized designs out when I come to them. SID quilting is so tedious and hard on your body (neck, shoulders, back, knees, hips etc) from standing at the machine for hours and working manually at a snail's pace with a little straight edge ruler in my left hand, driving my machine with my right hand. Seeing the more instantaneous gratification of the computerized designs helps me to stay positive and motivated to continue with the necessary but unglamorous grunt work.
In other news, His Royal Highness the Dog got a new toy today and I have never seen him this excited since that time he caught a squirrel. Isn't he handsome?
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| Samwise Kissyface Snuggle-Upagus, My Sweet Baboo |
Alrighty, you have made it all the way through to the very end of my blog post! Congratulations! Normally this would be the time to discuss goals for the upcoming week. I'm going to be traveling to see my son in Charlotte for his birthday and to work on an out of town project that I don't have time to get into right now. That means no more long arm quilting will get done until next weekend when I get back, but I'm planning to pack up some of my Stonefields appliqué blocks for hand stitching in the airport and on the plane. My goal is to avoid having my pretty little embroidery scissors confiscated by airport security, to not forget any of the little tools or gadgets I like to have with me for appliqué, and to get some of these blocks completed! Have a great week, everyone.
I'm linking up today's post with my favorite linky parties:
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
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