Wasn't yesterday's machine embroidery impressive on the Husqvarna Viking Designer Jade | 35?
Today we're going to combine the applique tips, the embroidery and some decorative stitching into an updated, dare I say, modern version of crazy patch.
Once you complete your "new" fabric, you can use it to make a tote bag, a journal cover, a pillow. Click the links to find a tutorial for each item.
My inspiration was a piece of a crazy patch quilt that I own. This was all hand done and the pieces are on the small side. I decided to make the pieces larger (yes - it's faster!) and do all the work on the Designer Jade | 35.
Choose some fabrics
I decided to let the stitching and embroidery shine through by using solid fabric. I choose solids from Northcott's Colorworks Premium Solid collection.
Use a foundation fabric
There are many ways to make this type of project. I could have cut pieces out and sewed them together with no foundation. I could have overlapped them and appliqued them. Instead, I chose the stitch 'n' flip method which I'll briefly outline below.
I started by cutting a piece of muslin a couple of inches larger than I actually need. I believe my foundation is 17" square. I want to make this easy and not have too many seams, so I'm minimizing the number of seams involved.
I drew a line diagonally on the muslin.
Sewing the fabric pieces to the muslin foundation
Then I took my first piece of fabric and laid it on the muslin base so that it covered at least one section.
Notice I didn't cut anything down to size - I just used FQs of the fabrics and trimmed them off once they were sewn together.
Then I took the next piece of fabric and laid them right sides together (although you can't tell when using solids). Notice that there's overlap. I'm going to sew a 1/4" seam along that long edge of the darker red. I'll trim away the lighter red that is visible and then flip the darker red over so it covers the next area.
Let's walk through it step by step.
When I flip that darker red over the seam, I now have two pieces stitched to the muslin foundation.
Now there's a lot of extra (bright red) fabric underneath the darker fabric so I'm going to trim that away.
I used scissors to trim that excess being careful to not cut the foundation square. Note this picture was taken after the third (pink) fabric was stitched in place over the darker red.
There's also excess fabric hanging over the edge of the muslin foundation. I used my rotary cutter to trim that away. I left a bit extra over the edge of the muslin and once the entire piece is completed, those edges will all be trimmed up.
I continued in this way working first to one side of my initial piece and then to the other side. Alternatively, you started on one side and worked to the other. Be sure to cover that muslin base entirely. You can see that I shortened that coral colored piece and that entire side will have to be trimmed a bit shorter because of that.
Audition the fabrics for the other side. Since this is stitch and flip, I'm going to change the direction of the pieces to make it easy. Again - there are many ways to do this, I could have joined multiple pieces together before I stitched and flipped, but I wanted to keep this simple.
Now it's time to start the process for the second half. I've laid out the first piece of yellow so that the seam will cover the ends of all the red pieces. Then I'll stitch and flip to cover this entire half.
Decorative stitching
Now we can have some fun with the decorative stitching.
I chose thread colors that somewhat matched my fabrics. I used a pre-wound bobbin and on top, I used rayon threads. They have a bit of shine to them, come in loads of different colors and are easy to use.
Then I browsed the stitch menus and using the techniques from earlier this week, I started the decorative stitches.
Since my pieces are fairly large, I didn't feel that one row of decorative stitching would be enough, so I started with one line of stitching directly on the seam and then stitched a second and third row on either side.
Using the presser foot as a guide, I added a second row of stitching to the right of the first one and then I added a matching row of stitching to the left of that first row.
YES - that's the same piece of fabric. The lighting can change the coloring a lot. Which goes to show that we need to be careful when choosing fabrics - can't say enough about having good light for that task.
Time to add some machine embroidery
I decided to add some embroidery from the USB embroidery stick that came with the Designer Jade | 35. I stitched one of the designs right on the piece and I also used the embroidery font to stitch my initials on the piece which is part of the tradition of crazy patch.
There wasn't enough fabric to properly hoop my project as this image is close to the edge. I simply basted an extra piece of fabric to the side, stitched out the design and removed the extra piece of fabric. The chalk lines are my placement marks when I hooped only because I wanted this design in a specific place on the fabric.
The hoop comes with centering marks engraved along the sides so it's easy to match up your reference lines with the engraved marks in the hoop.
For the next embroidery design, I also had to baste some extra fabric to the edge of the project as the placement of the font was too close to the edge to hoop properly. There are other ways of hooping the fabric without doing that, but that worked for me in a hurry with the supplies I had on hand.
Some of my fabric shapes are rather large. To fill some of the spaces, I stitched yet another embroidery design from the USB embroidery stick. This time I stitched the embroidery on another piece of fabric. Then I cut the embroidery out and appliqued it to my project. I used a zig zag stitch with very thin thread to do the applique.
This is a good piece to practice on. You get to try the decorative stitches, you get to play with the various embroidery designs and embroidery font and even try out applique.
Once I'm finished with the stitching, I'll be trimming the piece down. I haven't decided which of my three projects I'll make with it. I may even decide to keep it as a small wall hanging.
This small work in progress is just the tip of the iceberg of the things that you can do with the Husqvarna Viking Designer Jade | 35. The only limitation will be your imagination.
I'd love to see what fun project you end up making.
Tomorrow we wrap up this series with the Top 10 reasons why I love the Husqvarna Viking Designer Jade | 35. Have a great day! Ciao!
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