25. Trapplique – Part 2

Lol. I must have sounded tired and worn out yesterday in my post about the bathroom renovation. In truth the person really needing kudos is Josh. I’m fired up to fix all the closets in the house on top of everything else and the poor guy is struggling to find a clean towel amid all the chaos and confusion.

Personally I’m revved up and ready to go! So much so that I’m even going to continue to post videos during the remodel! Didn’t I tell you I find this kind of thing energizing?

So today let’s finish up Trapplique! The steps left to do are simple: lay out the pieces on the quilt:

Hand baste them in place with water soluble thread. We’re using this so we don’t have to worry about picking the stitches out later. This thread will just dissolve when we soak and block the quilt.

The next step is optional, but I found it pretty important for this particular quilt. Do a simple zigzag down along all the edges to hold the pieces in place. I did this in free motion, but you could use a walking foot if you were more comfortable with that.

Why did I do this in free motion? I’ve been experimenting a bit with free motion zigzag just for fun. It’s actually pretty easy to control and faster to applique because you could potentially zigzag, then filler quilt at the same time by switching from a zigzag to a straight stitch. You know how much I hate to change feet, so I’m just learning how to applique with my free motion foot on instead!

For this tacking zigzag, I used regular thread in the video, but by the time I finished shooting, I realized that more water soluble would probably make this job easier too. This stitching will be covered, but it’d be nice not to have to worry about the odd weird stitch and just use wash away thread for this too.

Which by the way, Express Your Love is NOT a beginner level trapplique quilt. All those little pieces swirling in and out are really tricky to line up properly. I can’t claim mine is in any way perfect. Not a bit!

Finally after everything is generally secure and in place, now it’s time to satin stitch! I used a super wide zigzag with my machine at 6mm wide and .20mm long and slowly stitched forward and hit the reverse button anytime I saw a gap in the stitching.

Suffice it to say, satin stitching is VERY boring. I had to give myself lots of incentives like a piece of chocolate for every lock of breath completed because it was just so slow and tedious. I think I’ve gained 3 pounds just to muscle through this boring bit. Still, this is a step that can’t be rushed if you want a nice, smooth, perfect satin stitch finish.

Now just make sure that you take off your Supreme Slider before starting the satin stitch! If you have your walking foot on, you definitely shouldn’t have the slider on because it will be ground against the feed dogs.

So now that I’ve written all this out, now it’s time to watch it!

I’m still having aspect ratio problems. If this video appears squished to you, switch to Mozilla Firefox browser and watch it there. Youtube is having a serious glitch in the upload and changing all my videos as they get on the site, then I have to manually stretch the video back with a tag, but it isn’t perfect and isn’t displaying correctly for everyone.

But as always, this is the best I can do! Enjoy!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day