Experiments in Applique

I’ve never appliqued anything before - it seemed, well … it seemed like too much trouble.  Me = occasionally lazy.  But yesterday I spent all day sewing, and I thought, well, what the hey?

So I made a cover for my sewing machine (and a seat cushion, but it’s not done yet) out of the leftover fabric from the crochet accessory holders I made a while back.  Actually, I just found the post for that project, and it tells me it was last July 24.  I can’t believe it was that long ago that I made those.  I was sure it was just October or something.

The fact that I’ve had that project sitting on my shelf for almost 9 months is scary.  On the other hand, going back through my blog like that I’m amazed at all the things I’ve done.  Sometimes, it would probably be helpful for me to go back and read what I’ve written and posted.  I appear to be somewhat busy.  Not quite sure where I got the time to do all that.

So here’s the cover, which is part of my plan to make my sewing area decorations & furnishings purple and green with flowers:

It has lavender quilted fabric with appliqued strips of the purple-green flower fabric.  This lovely cover features no pattern, some alarmingly crooked seams, and wonky applique.  However, I think it is perfectly serviceable, not too bad looking and  turned out surprisingly well for sorta making it up as I went along, and having only fabric scraps to work with.  Oh, and bias tape that was too thin.

Like I said, I’m practicing applique, so this seemed a good thing to test stuff on.  The larger applique is fabric on green felt.  I hate ironing this kind of tiny little curved edge fold-under.  HATE IT.  No wonder I haven’t done this before.

The smaller one is the same fabric-on-felt, except instead of turning the fabric edges under I used my machine’s satin stitch to embroider the edges and offset the fabrics.  I liked the way that one turned out better.  First time I’d used the satin stitch on my machine, too.  Interesting.  Must experiment further.

I’m off to camping this weekend, so I shall see you all on Monday!  Happy weekend!