Category — applique

This quilt was one of my favorites to work with! Brought to me by a wonderful woman who embroidered every block, she told me the story of how she was making it for her daughter. It has more work, joy, and talent, and love than any other quilt I have had the honor of doing. Here is a picture of the entire quilt:

Each block demanded different treatment, so we put our heads together, and came up with designs that incorporated hearts — to play on the theme of love and family. My favorite:
We added lots of hearts throughout the quilt, in many surprising places!

Receiving a hug from Leslie when this quilt was done was one of my happiest moments!

Here is another example of using embroidery and appliqué before the quilt is assembled. In this tablecloth, I appliquéd all of the small white squares first on the white tone-on-tone fabric, and then cut them to size and assembled each quilt square. The assembly of the quilt was much faster, because I was able to treat each appliquéd square just like a regular piece of the block. I know that I would have had a hard time trying to appliqué all of the squares if the quilt had already been assembled. I know lots of people who can do it that way, but I’m just not that brave! LOL!

Machine embroidery is shown on this quilt in two different ways. I digitized the appliqué designs, and used a blanket stitch for the edges. I wanted the soft look that blanket stitches can give over time, with just a touch of fraying through the stitches. This quilt was for my daughter’s sixteenth birthday — I can’t believe it’s been 4 years ago already!

You can use any of your existing appliqué designs if you have the digitizing software to enable you to change the satin stitches along the outer edge to a blanket stitch. As I mentioned, the edges will fray just a tiny bit over time, but that adds a soft look to the quilt.

For the lettering, I embroidered on the white fabric before I assembled the quilt. All of the bobbin thread from the embroidery and the appliqué is hidden inside of the quilt layers.

This little lap quilt has seen a lot of hugging over the past four years, but it just gets better with age.