In the last blog, I wrote about our Quilt Guild block challenge. The theme is Ruby Red Celebration for our 40th quilt show. I decided to do a pieced red heart with all dark fabrics that had the appearance of solid fabrics.
I call this kind of piecing – collage because it is what you do with a paper collage. In a paper collage you have construction paper or poster card stock as a foundation and then you glue pictures on top until you cover the whole piece. What I do is similar but instead of glue, I use needle and thread.
I always start in the middle with this type of work. This time I start with a square of the accent fabric provided (the kit included a white background fabric and then 8” of an accent fabric so there would be consistency throughout all the blocks) and pinned it to the middle of the heart. You can stitch it down but since the other fabrics will be sewn on to it, I decided to pin this to hold it in place.
Then I cut a shape
from my second fabric. It does not
have to be square; in fact, it will give
some interest to the piece if it is not square.
The thing with sewing the pieces on is that you will stitch and flip the
fabric so you want to make sure the fabric when flipped will go in the right direction. I laid the second piece down and before I
stitched, I held it in place with a pin, flipped it and instead of lying it next
to the center piece, it flipped on top of it.
What you want is to lay the next fabric over the sewn one, right side of the fabrics together. Then sew it and then flip it and it will lay in the right direction.
Once you
start adding fabric you just want to go around the edges of the sewn fabric
again and again until you get to the edge of your design.
Every time you add fabric, make sure you are covering the raw edges of the pieces already sewn. Raw edges will cause the fabric to start unraveling which will not look nice and may take out the sewing. The long lighter red piece on the left in the picture above is pulled back in the picture below to show the raw edges of the previous sewn fabric.
As fabric is added, eventually I got to a point where it was hard to cover all the raw edges with the sew and flip method. This ended up being along the edge of the design. So I began to applique the pieces on. This way I could hide the raw edge of the piece I was adding by turning the seam allowance under and stitching it down. It also meant that the piece had a curve in its design which I liked.
So I kept adding fabric until the entire interfacing heart was covered. I then traced the heart design on the red fabric of the design, so I knew where the edge of the design was to turn under and applique to the white background fabric of the block. Because the seam allowance was thick with layers of red fabric (I added the fabric right over the seam allowance so no raw edges would show on the top), I decided to baste the seam allowance down. This way I wasn’t fighting with it while I did the appliqueing.
The last step is appliqueing on the background fabric and the challenge block is done.
©2022 Cheryl E.
Fillion
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