Make Your Own Applique Quilt Patterns

We're ready to rock and roll for this Christmas holiday season. We're looking at some really great gifts that we're going to be helping you provide and make for your loved ones. What I've been thinking a lot about is we don't always have to be running to the store if we don't have all, everything we need. Say you want to do something really quick and easy. You can do your own application pattern.

I here have just tried to figure out like a turkey for Thanksgiving. And I just took a piece of scratch paper and kind of drew it out. Now what I would do if I was going to use this as an applicator itself, I would take the product that I called Steam-A-Seam, it's Steam-A-Seam2, and it's a double stick fusible web. And what I would do is I would take it, I would put it over my, whatever project I'm making. I probably would use a light box or put it up on a window, you know, just have this, tape it up onto a window and then tape the Steam-a-Seam over it and then start drawing around it, like dry on this section.

And then I'd probably move it and draw the nose and then I'd move it again and draw, you know, the little gobbler and then each of the individual feathers. And for this section down here with the feet, I most likely would use a decorative stitch or maybe hand stitch something on. Something that's important to remember while you're using these appliques is you want to use a top stitch needle for decorative stitch. Now there's lots of different stitches you can use on your machine. You can use a blanket stitch, a satin stitch, a button hole stitch, just a plain old zigzag or a lot of people like to have that rough edge around the edge.

And they'll just stitch around it with a basic, just a straight stitch. But if you have decorative stitches on your machine, you might want to try some of those out. When you're doing, going around and you are stitching around, you might want to use a 12 weight applique thread. The reason that I tell you this, 12 weight is very thick thread, the lower the number, the thicker the thread, and it makes a really nice appearance on your, on your project that you're doing. And then I probably would do just French knots for those eyes.

And then I made another one. I just couldn't figure out how big I would actually want it. And depending on what I wanted it for. And then I thought, well, you know what? Holly leaves to be cute.

Wouldn't it be cute on, on a nice little towel? You know, let's say a towel like this. We could just do a couple little holly leaves and maybe the snowman in the center. And we could probably do French knots again in red thread. And so what you're going to do is you just want to figure out what you want to put on an item and then just start doodling.

I think you'd be surprised at what you're able to accomplish. I, however, thought I really wanted to do something special for my grandchildren. So I went online and I found this cute little, it was Olaf, Frozen Disney cutout. And it's supposed to be a puzzle for the children. So what I did then was I just clicked on it again and I enlarged it.

And once I enlarged it, I took it to my Steam-A-Seam. Now the thing about the Steam-A-Seam is there really are two sides that you can copy on to. One side has got the sticky adhesive. The other side is free floating. I had started to copy on that and decided, you know what, I don't think I want to do that because that's going to be moving too much.

I really wanted to do it on the other side. So that's what I did. The problem with that is, is that you still want to have that backing on it while you're tracing. And the reason for that is you don't want it to stick to whatever your pattern is, and you'll lose all of that, that web, that fusible web that you have. So I took, and I copied it all onto my little area here.

And then I decided that I would put it on fabrics. Well, I have a lot of fabrics that are laying around the house. So what I did was I went and I took just, I have a scrap bucket, and I went and I took a bunch of scraps that I thought were just a lot of fun. And I thought a carrot nose. And, you know, you could actually not even use the nose but you could go and get a carrot button.

The sky is the limit. Use your imagination, your creativity. And so I just kind of used whatever I had on hand. And I created my little snowman. But because we have, just because I put it together like that does not mean that that's the way it needs to be put together.

I have some other pieces here and I thought together we might be able to put it together in a different manner. I had him holding his head. I could have had his head still on him. And I went into the craft section at Michael's in the scrapbooking section and purchased these little Christmas lights. And so you could have them in his hands or have it hanging from his head, like he got into them because that's his kind of Olaf's style, but that will make a cute little Christmas gift.

Now I, what I did do was I just zig-zagged inside of the arms and I did the satin stitch all the way around. I zig-zagged just are on the nose. So some of it has a real finished look and others more rustic. So it doesn't matter. You can use it, be a little eclectic in your, your stitches that you use.

Let's just take this forward here. And throw a little bit of him together just to show you how easy this is. I have everything that I need. So here is his body. And before we take any of the back off of anything, we want to make sure that we get it where we want it.

Olaf's head actually comes in two parts. I put it in two parts because I really wanted to accentuate the way his, so there he is. He's got this great big smile. And he's got a tooth. His tooth is going to sit right there.

These are his eyes, but they go inside of eyes already. Got his hair. You can put his legs, we could actually put his feet right on top of him or coming off of him like this, like he's sitting. And these are the buttons. I actually did mark on the back because the buttons and the eyes are so similar.

So I did mark on the back. This is an eye, this is an eye. I'm missing one of his white eyes. There it is. And the eyes don't have to sit this high up.

You can have it set down. Okay, so we kind of know that's the way we want to do it. The cool thing about this is that as we take each of these off, it's got a stickiness on the backside so we can stick it down. And it will stay. Not permanently, but long enough for us to figure out what exactly we want to do.

And it comes off pretty easily. Bigger piece has come off much easier than the smaller ones of course, because we can get a grasp onto them. Oh, and so here, look, I had just put his button on his face instead of on his body. It's a good thing that I had marked them. So this one will go in the center.

And pretty easily I can just take that button off and stick it right there. Have his face right here. And I don't really want to stick it down too hard yet on the upper face because I want to be able to adjust the eyes once I have the eyes together. So here are the eyes, and that one's already off. So we're going to kind of stick them in because they are a little bit big.

And all we really want this black to do is to outline the white of the eyes. So it's okay as much as you want to utilize that. As we go, there we are. See how nice that looks. And then we also have these tiny little pieces and be careful not to lose these tiny little pieces.

These are his eyebrows. And that really makes Olaf Olaf. I'm just going to move these to the side. It looks like I may have lost his nose somewhere. But that'll be all right, because I'll probably put a button nose on there that looks like a carrot.

So we're almost together here. And then we're just going to press it. The most time that it's going to take to do this is probably just the the actual tracing and then stitching doing the, whatever stitch you just choose to do. Make sure you hit every single area. Let's see, let's put him right here like that.

And we'll this arm, put that underneath that. Well, here's the nose. Let's get this on him. What is, what is the name of that moose? My goodness.

For a minute there, I thought the moose came and ate his nose. Oh, that's a good thing because it wasn't on that paper well enough. So we'll get that on. And we'll put him right here. What a difference a nose makes, huh.

We can bring this down just a little bit. Okay, and then it's so simple. All we do is we take the iron and we just press it on him. And what I'm using, I would normally use an applique sheet, but I had this whole sheet left from the back of the Steam-A-Seam that the part that comes off that we're not going to trace on. And so that works real slick as well, because look at it, I can just peel it right off.

So you don't have to go out and buy an applique sheet if you don't own one. We're all about being frugal when we need to be so we can buy the fabric when we need to. So here we have this little guy. And we could just build a nice little snowman on this nice little towel. And he'd make just a cute little towel for somebody, or we could put him on a t-shirt.

And look at it. Wouldn't it be cute, he can be holding. It just takes a little stitch here and a little stitch here for him to be holding these little lights. And then you've got a really cute little Christmas gift. You could send this off, along with a plate of cookies.

The other thing that you can do is you could do the same idea on the, on the towel for your neighbors. Only use a stencil and cut out some really cool looking leaves. And with something like this, you could almost do a little circle with them. They're all different kinds of leaves. Just adhere them in the slightest way.

Have this coming up a little bit. These are those pumpkin leaves. So you always see more than one in any grouping. Then once you to have these all put together, really cool idea, is and figure out where you want it, really cool idea is to, to then adhere it to a piece of fabric and cut around the fabric in a quarter to a half an inch around it, and then give it to them with a candle. And you could, you could quilt that fabric, or it could be a piece of maybe felt that you put on it or a piece of a heavy wool that you've bought at the store or that you felted yourself.

So I hope that you've enjoyed these quick little ideas. I've also used, I try to use multicolor fabrics whenever I am doing a project like this. So that way the fabrics really do blend. This is a piece of fabric that I used for that So I hope you've enjoyed it. And I look forward to seeing all of your projects.