Easy Applique Tutorial

As I was adding applique balloons to my Party Bear Embroidery,  I thought I'd make a quick tutorial for easy applique. It's really an applique tutorial for embroiderers-that-don't-sew. Combining applique and embroidery can give such fun results and it's very easy to do, even if you don't have any sewing tools or materials. I used some materials from my sewing cabinet for the tutorial but I will suggest alternative supplies that most embroiderers have in their tool kit. And yes, I know 'applique' is spelled with an 'acute accent' but I can never find those quickly enough on my keyboard! (Tips are welcome)

Supplies

For applique I use:
- Fabric to sew your applique on (obviously!).
- Fabric for your applique
- Heat 'n Bond Iron-on adhesive (or a pin)
- Scissors
- Needle (regular sewing needle or small crewel embroidery needle)
- Thread (or Embroidery Floss)

Attaching applique to fabric

You can simply cut out the applique shape you want and temporarily attach it to fabric with a pin. However,  I almost always use Heat 'n Bond because it holds your applique perfectly in place which makes the end result neater. It's an iron-on adhesive that you use on the back of your applique fabric. Iron on the Heat 'n Bond, making sure the side that feels rough is facing the wrong side (back) of your applique fabric. You can either cut the shape you need from the Heat 'n Bond paper before you iron it onto the fabric. Or you can cut out the shape afterwards (which is what I did). Put an old tea towel underneath to be completely sure the adhesive doesn't stick to your ironing board. 

Peel off the paper and you end up with an applique with a sticky backside. Put the applique glue side down, onto fabric and iron it on. It's a really quick method and it probably takes more time to read my instructions than to prepare your applique piece this way. :)

There are more complex ways of preparing an applique, where you fold sides under so you are not left with unfinished edges on your fabric but as this is an Easy Applique Tutorial we are going to leave the sides as they are. So please know that depending on the fabric and whether you use and adhesive the fabric can unravel a bit. The Liberty fabrics I used on the blue balloons didn't unravel at all but the quilt fabric I used for the lighter balloons did look a bit rougher on the edges. That is, before I used the Blanket Stitch to sew around the balloons. 

Sewing the applique on

I like to use Blanket Stitch to sew appliques onto fabric. It's a versatile, decorative stitch that is also used in embroidery. It's also a nice way to finish your unfinished fabric edges.

Let the needle and thread come up on (not through) the edge of the applique fabric (A) and insert it into the fabric at B, diagonally from the point where the needle came up first. 

Pull needle and thread through, but not entirely. Make a loop, and let the needle come up again from underneath, through the base fabric (not the applique fabric) at C. 

Pull needle and thread through and you've made the first blanket stitch! Continue all the way around the shape. The next step is to make the diagonal stitch again, then the loop etc etc. To follow the curves of a shape neatly with your stitches, take care not to make space between stitches too wide.

You should end up with something like this! I hope this tutorial was useful to you. If you have any questions let me know....You can find the Party Bear Embroidery Pattern in my shop. :)

Furry Nice Class Reminder

This is my second version of my Polar Bear pattern (see my first version here) because after stitching him on regular fabric  I wanted to try to and embroider him on patterned fabric as well. I chose a rather busy Liberty print. Obviously this Polar Bear is far from finished but I will stitch along with the students of my second Furry Nice Class that starts late September so he definitely will be finished in the next two months.

If you are interested in joining the class too you might want to do that today or tomorrow as the Early Bird discount ($40 instead of $45) expires after tomorrow! Find more info about the class here.

My Trip to London

I had a great time in London last weekend! After dropping off my suitcase at the hotel Friday morning I headed to Earl's Court which was the Tube station nearest to my hotel. Since I read Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere I can never view the London Underground in the same way again and many of the Tube Stations and the famous 'Mind the Gap' phrase have a special connotation to me now. If you like (urban) science fiction than you should definitely check it out, especially if you are traveling to London.

Anyway, I was meeting my friend Sami at Earl's Court and we went on a quest to find Shaukat Fabrics. A store that is supposed to be like an Aladdin's Cave of Liberty Fabrics, some even say bargains can be found there. Well there was a lot of Liberty Fabric there, that's for sure, a bit overwhelming actually! I was really excited when I found the stacks of remnant fabrics. Sami and I went through the stack where all pieces cost 1 pound each, and I dug up a really lovely fabric (the white with flowers). The 2 and 5 pound stack was more impressive and there's where I found the other fabrics. The larger pieces were about a quarter of a metre and cost 5 pound. Reasonably priced but not exactly super-bargains.

Later that day Sami and I met up with Sophie (of What Delilah Did) and we went to see an interesting exhibition called 'Making Colour' in the National Gallery. After that we sat in a park (not sure which one) and talked lots, because that's something you do in parks rather than museums. :) We also managed to squeeze in a quick visit to Liberty where I found this fabulous patchwork deer. Saturday I went to the &Stitches Picnic in Hyde Park and I wrote a little bit about that on the &Stitches blog yesterday. I had quite a lot of time for myself on Sunday and visited the Victoria & Albert Museum where I saw some beautiful embroidered garments and textiles. Especially the Chinese Silk Embroideries were very impressive. 

I received some fabulous gift over the weekend like these two pendants. The one on the left was made by Sami in her signature blackwork-on-Liberty- fabric-style. The one on the right was stitched by Sophie (from &Stitches) and the odd thing was that the motif almost exactly matched that of the dress I was wearing on the day she gave me the pendant! 

It was great to spend a few days in one of my favourite cities again and I felt very lucky to have such wonderful company during my time in London. Thanks friends!

p.s. I totally forgot to mention Pigeon Steve-with-the-Leaf who joined us at the &Stitches picnic. Definitely will write about him in the future as I'm planning to embroider a Steve the Pigeon Portrait :)

Liberty Bird (part two)

Often the reason I stop working on something is because I'm not sure how to continue with a piece and I'm pretty sure this was the case with this project. But when I pulled this Tufted Titmouse  embroidery from the WIP basket I suddenly *knew* I had to add some stitching to the background.

I'm using colours that are similar to the colours used in the fabric design but generally they are more bold and I'm adding some variety in the shades as well. From afar the stitching on the background isn't immediately obvious but up close it's really nice. :)

Liberty Bird

Last week I wrote about my plans of stitching a Tiny Tufted Titmouse. Making these animal portraits is a bit like a treat to me, there's no pressure and no deadline and no writing down of colours and stitches and not much of a plan either...

Anyway,  I suddenly thought it might be fun to stitch it on a really pretty, flowery fabric. Lately I have only used cotton satin fabric for my tiny animal portraits. Cotton Satin is a medium weight fabric with a close weave and perfect for embroideries with lots of tiny stitches. Then I found this scrap of gorgeous Liberty Fabric in my stash which is really is not very suitable for my type of stitching at all. The fabric is quite thin and I can hardly see what I'm doing with that busy print but the embroidery is turning out rather charming so far. I really like how the bird seems to emerge from the flowers. Now I'm tempted to do more of these 'Liberty' birds after I have finished this one!

Guess what?

Any ideas as to what this is going to be? It really looks like an owl from this angle but it isn't... A little idea I have had on my pin board for about 2 years but never get round to actually try out. During my lunch break today I made progress though and actually cut into some of my precious Liberty fabric so it better turn out cute!  

p.s. Guess what? (part 2) I have a little Sale going on in my Follow the White Bunny shop as I'm going to discontinue some of my older patterns. It's quite possible that one or two of these patterns will re-appear in an updated version at some point but for now it's farewell! Sale ends on March 15th.

Colour inspiration: London

On my recent trip to London I picked up a gorgeous set of Liberty of London Fabrics. I took one of the fabrics as a starting point to make a London inspired floss combination. First I put together a set that was a near exact match with the colours used in the fabric but that didn't work for me. So I 'toned down' some of the colours and ended up with (from left to right) DMC six stranded floss no's  471, 321, 826, 829 and 728.  To me this palette is 'London' translated in embroidery floss colours!

Fat Quarterly Retreat London 2013 (1)

                                                    Confusion at Liberty photo by Catrin of I'd Rather Sew

I arrived at London City Airport early Friday morning for this year's edition of the Fat Quarterly Retreat. I was very thankful that I could get into my hotel room early because the 45 minute Tube journey was warm to say the least. So after cooling down a bit I then met up with Carina and we headed to  Liberty  to attend a talk about Liberty Fabrics! There was *some* confusion about where the room was where we were supposed to be so the whole group of 30 (?) women climbed stairs, descended stairs, went outside, went inside again, saw the Liberty Mail room, climbed some more stairs, you get the idea... I think the photo, where you see me on the back at the delivery entrance, says it all. But we got there in the end. :)

The Liberty talk was fabulous. We heard about where the inspiration for the collections of the past years came from and a bit about the history of Liberty fabrics too. Obviously things are well recorded now but about some of the fabrics and designers in the late 19th and early 20th century not all details are clear. Nowadays Liberty regularly works with established artists, like Grayson Perry and Lauren Child, but also with talented art students on their fabric collections.

I loved the many examples of how old Liberty motifs are cleverly transformed into new and fresh designs. I also learned that the name Tana (from the famous Liberty Tana Lawn) came from a lake in Africa. After the talk had ended we got to see a few of the original artworks and sketches that some of the fabric designs had been based on. We weren't allowed to put all of what we had seen on our blogs but I did take some photos for personal reference/inspiration.

Because we arrived a little early at Liberty, Carina and I had a look around in the store. The whole store is lovely but we obviously were mainly interested in the craft department. There were Liberty Fabrics of course, and a generous choice of Kaffe Fassett too. I spotted lots of What Delilah Did cross stitch kits as well (yay Sophie!). Well worth a visit if you are in London!

After a quick stop at the wonderful Wholefoods store for lunch (all yummy healthy and organic stuff, expensive too!) we headed back to the hotel to prepare for our afternoon Retreat Class. I wish I could say I made some PJ trousers in Kerry's three hour class but I didn't managed to finish them. Even with a great deal of help from both Kerry and Trudi. I now have two separate legs, which is a good start! :)

In the evening I started working on my Bird the Squirrel embroidery and continued to do so between classes the other day. People who saw him said they didn't realise these embroideries were so tiny, so I put a ruler next to him in the photo to show his true size, which is a little over an inch :)

Find part two of my Retreat recap here!