Step 1: Choose a print. You'll need a good cotton fabric with well defined flowers, animals, fruit or insects. In this case, I chose a print with pink peonies.
Step 4: You will need to use some fusible web. I use light weight fusible web by Pellon. It's called, Wonder Under.
Step 4: Determine which motif from the cotton print that you want to use and cut around it leaving a good inch or more. Cut a piece of the fusible web a little bit larger than the cotton fabric.
Step 6: Cut the excess fusible web away so that it is the same size as the cotton print. If you don't do this, you'll have glue on your fabric, your iron and your ironing board.
Step 8: Do not pull the paper off yet. Using a very sharp pair of scissors, carefully cut the flower motif out from the fabric.
Step 9: Once you have your flower motif cut out, you can carefully peal away the backing paper from your applique. The glue should now be on the back of your cotton print.
Step 10: Play around a little bit to see where you want your applique. I knew when I started where I wanted it but be sure it's positioned exactly as you please because once you iron it on, it's there to stay.
Now, if you find that your edges fray a twinge or if the little points of the petals don't want to stay down, you can use a teeny, tiny dab of fabric glue (just a little bit on a toothpick) to hold it in place. It shouldn't happen if you use a good quality cotton fabric but occasionally it will and there's no need to fret over it. A little dab of glue will take care of it.
So that's it for Part 1 of the Broiderie Perse Applique Tutorial for Crazy Quilting. I'm sure if you've done traditional sane quilting with applique in the past, you may think this is a no brainer but I like to write my tutorials for stitchers who have never tried some of these techniques before. I want everyone to feel comfortable in learning new things and trying these tutorials so I really try to make them as clear as possible.
Part 2 of this tutorial will be on how to go about highlighting your applique with stitching. I'll have that tutorial ready in about a week. In the meantime, get your blocks sewn up and your applique ready. I'm really hoping that some of my readers will give this a try. It's a lot of fun and a great embellishment to add your crazy quilting skills!
