Playful Petals Blog Tour Day 3

Day 3 of the Playful Petals blog tour brings you my Starflower Quilt.  Long time followers of my blog may remember this bundle of fabrics that I shared right before I began working on the quilts for my book.

And these fabrics went on to become the Starflower quilt, the first quilt completed for Playful Petals.  The fabrics are a mix of fabrics from my stash but the quilt could also be completed using 20 fat 8ths.

Starflower was quilted by Margaret and she did an amazing job.  I usually have a little bit of an idea of how I would like my quilts quilted but for this quilt, I knew exactly how I wanted it done and it turned out just as I imagined.

The backing is from one of my favorite Heather Bailey lines, Freshcut.  This is still one of my most favorite lines of fabric.  And I love this large scale print as backing.

I completely changed up the feel of the accompanying Starflower Pillow by using bold fabrics from Sandi Henderson’s Secret Garden line of fabric.

For today’s stop on the tour, Jessica will be sharing over on her blog.  Jessica’s blog caught my eye this summer, as all kinds of Orange Peel quilts began popping up on Instagram from the Orange Peel Quilt Along she hosted.

I loved seeing all of these quilts and really enjoyed when some of them were made using patterns from Playful Petals!  What a great quilt along!  Be sure to pop over and see what she will be sharing with us today. =)

On Monday, I mentioned that you could leave your applique questions in the comments and I would answer them throughout the blog tour.  Here are a couple that I received so far(feel free to keep asking!):

Question: I have never appliqued before, but I have these dupioni silk fat quarters that I want to use for applique. I was thinking about using fusible interfacing and do the turn inside out method. Does that sound like a good idea? I don’t know how the interfacing will work with the silk.

Answer: First off, I would recommend that you try out applique using an inexpensive, user friendly fabric like quilting cotton and practice a bit.  Because silk dupioni tends to cost a bit more than quilting cotton you want to make sure that you have your technique down and it’s one you enjoy!  Because I have never worked with silk dupioni, I did a little bit of Internet research, I came across this information Taming Silk Dupioni.  This gives a lot of great, useful information including the recommendation to use Soft Fuse fusible web for applique.  I have used Soft Fuse and it is a wonderful, very lightweight fusible.

Question: Thank you for doing the book and being so sharing. Appliqué the “a” word.i have not done appliqué they way its usually thought of in the quilting world. I appliqué repairs for my grandchildren’s favorite, blankets, pillows, stuffies. Appliqué to fix their favorite treasures makes both of us very happy.  My question is how do you hold the appliqué piece so as you sew around everything comes out even no puckers or wrinkles I’ve had more than a few times that I’ve had to add embrodery to cover appliqué boo boos.

Answer:  Using applique as a repair method is a very practical application!  There are a couple different ways to keep those little applique pieces in place while you sew them down.  You could use a temporary fabric adhesive such as 505 Spray and Fix.  You would spray the back of your applique piece & place it in the intended location and the adhesive will keep it in place while you sew.  The adhesive will wash right out leaving no sticky residue.  The bonus to this method is that the applique is re-positionable until it is sewn down.  Another great option is to use Elmer’s school glue, the washable kind.  For this method, you would place a couple dots of glue around the edges of the applique.  Place the applique where you would like it and set it by pressing with a hot iron for just a few seconds.  Many quilter’s claim that the glue doesn’t gunk up their sewing machine needles at all–however, if you are concerned about this place the glue dots in from the edge of the applique where you will not be sewing.

Thank you for the questions ladies!–Keep them coming!