How to Applique: Fusible Applique

I'm gonna show you, a very cool way to make reversible quilts with fusible applique. And to start out, I wanna show you a quilt that I made for my niece. This quilt is reversible it's chocolate, brown and pink on one side and on the backside, it's the reverse image in pink and chocolate brown. Now I was inspired to make this quilt by a comforter that I saw in a kid's catalog. And I thought, well, we need to come up with a way that quilt makers can make reversible quilts too.

So I'm gonna show you today what I came up with. We're gonna make just a very small project. This is just a little potholder sized quilt to help you learn the technique and practice it. And instead of using solid colors for this quilt, I used two fabrics that are the same print but different color ways. And you can see that the image is reversed when we flip it over.

So to start, you need your little ironing board and your iron all heated up and ready to go. You need two squares of fabric, one for the background of both sides of your project. And you're gonna need a second square of each fabric to make the applique. These are 8 1/2" squares and you'll also need an 8 1/2" square of a natural batting. This is a wool batting.

And the reason is because we're gonna apply heat to this later, and I'll show you that in a bit. You'll also need a pattern. This is just a little applique bird that I printed off of a cusec and I've already traced my first shape onto a piece of fusible web. You will need two pieces of fusible web as well. We'll use this one in a minute and here's the first one already to go.

So I'm gonna take my first background square, we'll use, I'm sorry, not the background square, the first fusible square. This is the dark fabric and we're gonna position the bird on the wrong side and go ahead and press, let the iron sit on that shape long enough to make sure you got a really good fusion going on. Now, it's a good idea to lift the iron and set it back down versus kind of sliding the iron over the shape because you don't want it to slip while that glue is heated up and setting. Now, heat, I think we've got a good shape there, good fusion. Now you can see that I cut this out.

I traced the pattern and then I cut it out just about 1/2" outside the lines. So now that we're fused to the fabric, I'm gonna go ahead and cut on the lines. Now with fusible applique, remember that your tracing is going to be the opposite. It's going to be a mirror image of the fabric patch that you produce. And we're gonna need two shapes, one for each side of the quilt that are mirror image to each other.

So I'll show you that in just a second. And you can see little inconsistencies, little differences happen with your cutting and your tracing. So, instead of working off the pattern for both shapes, I'm gonna make the second shape based on the pattern I'm cutting out right now. So this is my brown bird and he's gonna get fused onto a cream background square. And remember, we're gonna fuse him onto the right side.

So we've got our background square. This paper backing of the fusible web comes right off. You can see it's pretty shiny there where the the glue has fused to the fabric and you can position that in the center, just the way you like it. And again apply heat gently to make sure, it doesn't slip aside. Make sure you follow the manufacturer's instructions for the feasible web that you have.

Some different products will have different instructions. They'll tell you to use different heat, they'll tell you to apply the heat for different amounts of time, so very important to follow those instructions. Okay, I think we've got our bird fuse to our first background square. I'm gonna let that cool for just a second. It's still a little warm to the touch because the next step is to lay a second sheet, a feasible web over our fused square and trace the backside, the feasible shape for the backside.

And we don't wanna put that glue on a hot piece of fabric. So it feels like it's nice and cool now. And I'm just gonna go ahead and do my tracing. Now, with the quilt that I made for my niece, that was a very big, very complicated shape. So there was a lot of tracing and a lot of cutting from a very big pattern, lots of opportunities for those little tiny shapes, little tiny cutouts to get distorted.

So, and especially when you fuse a shape like that down to a big background fabric, there's a lot of opportunity for that shape to kind of bend and it won't lay down in the exact same way as you had drawn the pattern. So that's why it's a good good idea to draw your reverse shape from your first fit square. And I'm gonna just cut away again about 1/2" outside of the drawn lines. Enough to be real precise, and this is also a really good way to save some fabric. There's no point in some fusible, there's no point in pressing all that fusible to the back of fabric when you can use both of these.

And now we have our fusible web cutout for the reverse side of the quilt, but we're not gonna use this quite yet. So set that aside for now and set aside your scraps. And the next step is to do some work on the machine. I've got my machine set up for the next step. So I have a brown thread in the top and a brown thread in the bottom because I'm gonna use brown thread, both places when I stitch to the final stitching.

You can see I've made my quilt sandwich already. I have my first few square layered with my 8 1/2" square of wool batting. And the opposite background square is pinned to the back and I just have some safety pins holding everything in place. Now, the other thing about how I have my machine set up, it's going to darning foot. So it's all set up for free motion, I've dropped the feed dogs and we're just gonna free motion stitch around the outline of the bird.

I like to take that first stitch and just use the tip of a pencil to kind of pull on that first stitch and bring the bottom thread up to the top. That way you can hold both threads out of the way when you start to stitch. And you want the needle to just kind of bounce right along the outside of that shape. So here we go. Okay.

Once you've stitched all the way around your shape, take the piece out from under the machine and clip your threads. And you can see that on the back side of the piece you now have a guideline for placing the other fusible piece, and that's what we'll do next. I've gone ahead and removed the safety pins from the quilt sandwich and I went ahead and traced and rather fused and cut out the second bird that's going to go on the backside of the quilt sandwich. And again, if we look at the backside, we have a very faint stitching line. That's going to help us position the second bird onto the back of the quilt.

Now you can't really see it because I've used a brown thread and that blends in really nicely. And that's okay because we're gonna finish this project by satin stitching around the edges. And sometimes if you don't get a really good satin stitch, that outline thread can show through. So, it's good to use the same thread you're gonna use for the finishing. So, I'm gonna make sure before I remove the paper backing from my second bird, that it's going to fit inside the stitching that I've just done and it looks like it's gonna work.

So, we're going to go ahead and press that into place. And the first step, it's to just kind of pinch over one of the edges of that fusible shape and peel off the paper backing, and just use the tips of your fingers to make sure that all those little curves and edges are pushed into the right place inside that stitching outline. Looks pretty good, and carefully press. I like to do just a little bit of pressing on every part of the bird. It's kind of based, fuses it into place before you go back and really apply the heat and make sure that you're getting a good fusion there.

This is also the reason it's best to use that wool batting because if you're using a synthetic batting at this point, you could melt it and that could ruin your whole project. So those good natural fiber battings are really the best to work with. Okay. It looks like we've got a good fusion. And the final step is to set and stitch around the edges of the bird.

Okay, we're getting ready to finish. And so I've got my machine set up to do set and stitching. As you can see, I've already got my open toed presser foot installed on the machine. I've got a satin stitch set to about a 3.6 width and about a .3 length. So that'll give us a nice dense stitch.

Now, one thing to note, is when you're doing a traditional fused quilt and you're not worried about the backside, you're gonna put that, most of your stitching is gonna end up right on the patch. And you're gonna run the right side of the stitch down the raw edge of the patch. For this, no matter how carefully you cut and trace and stitch and fuse, there are always gonna be little edges along your shape that don't perfectly line up. So we're gonna pull the stitch off the patch just a little bit and I'm gonna run the edge of the patch straight down the center of the presser foot and straight down the center of that stitch. So let's get started.

First thing I'm gonna do, is take one stitch. And again, I'm gonna pull that bob and thread up to the top so I can keep it out of the way, line up that presser foot, along the edge of the patch. And here go. You just gently turn the shape so that the edge of the patch feeds again right down the center of that presser foot a little bit more. And then when you take this out of the machine, and cut your threads, you'll see that we have finished the raw edge of both birds.

And we've covered up that stitching line that we did to create our placement line early in the process. So once you've stitched all the way around your bird, you are going to have a finished project that looks much like this, satin stitched all the way around in just one pass and then trim the edges and bind them to finish, and you're all done.