SYS ~ Bits and Pieces Applique

Welcome back!  Today we have Susan from Crafterhours.  She and her frined Adrianna blog together (how fun is that?).  It's entertaining to watch them interact together and they each bring something unique to their site.  Today we are getting a lesson on fusing our scraps to be used as appliques.  I love all the possibilites!

Hi Scrap Your Stashers! I'm Susan, and I'm so glad (the other) Susan invited us to join her here. My friend Adrianna and I blog at crafterhours about all sorts of things related to crafting for our children (4 girls between us), our homes, our friends and ourselves. And then there's the occasional tangent about a place we went or things we like. This week we're hosting Skirt Week, and readers are voting, starting today, for their favorite skirts. I hope you'll check it out!


We write a lot of tutorials about how to make things, but today's tutorial is less about the product, in this case, and more about the process.  The more sewing you do, the more scraps you have. And the more scraps you have, the more you have to figure out what to keep. How small is too small? What can you use super tiny scraps for?


I like to fuse them together and use them much like I might use felt. Here's an example of what my daughter K (she's 4) and I made together. She made the silly "ooooh" face all by herself:

Usually appliques involve a satin stitch around the edge of a shape, like this:

Me? I'm not so much a fan of the satin stitch. Especially if the applique has a lot of parts and/or if the parts are small. It can get too chunky and clunky, I think. But if a fabric is fused to another piece of fabric, you don't have to worry much about the edges. They won't stay perfect, but the fraying is limited.


Here are a few other examples of how we've used them:

On a jacket, on wall art, and on a petal shirt in knit fabric

So you'll start with a pile of scraps.

And you'll iron them flat.

If you want to cut a shape out of fabric, you can apply just enough iron-on adhesive to capture that little bit. I use Heat n' Bond, but there are a number of products that achieve the same thing. Cut the sheet just a tad larger than the shape you want to capture.

Peel the paper off. Relatedly, this is one of the things I like about Heat n' Bond. The paper stays attached until you peel it off. On other types it doesn't. And some don't have paper attached at all. I find that a lot harder to work with.

Lay that on another scrap with the wrong sides together and iron it down.

 Trim him and he's ready to stitch on to just about anything. An easy straight stitch 1/4" to 1/8" from the edge.

But what's even more exciting than that is using up all of the little precious scraps. The teeny tiny bits you can't bear to get rid of. 

Lay your scraps right side down, puzzling them together so that you've got very small overlaps in-between them. You want to be sure that alllll parts of the iron-on adhesive are covered. If it gets on your ironing board, it ain't ever coming off. And if it gets on your iron, you can get it off but it's a pain and it'll make your iron sticky until you stop what you're doing and clean it. A bummer on either count. On the other hand, the more overlap you have the less you'll be able to maximize your scraps, so you want minimal overlap.

Lay the iron-on adhesive on top and... iron it on.

Peel the paper away and you have what looks like a scrappy vinyl covered tablecloth.

Iron a large scrap flat and place the two wrong sides together. Press. And they're fused!

I like to trim the non-fused scraps away before I start cutting shapes. You can cut freehand or draw with a water or air soluble marker if you want something more precise.

In this case I was cutting pieces that K could use to decorate a shirt.

She laid them on the shirt the way she wanted them, and I pinned them in place.

I stitched them in place. I'll admit, I was rushing a bit on this one. On the wider petal pieces I need to go back and add a stitch around the shape, especially since this is something that will be washed a lot. On narrower pieces a stitch through the middle of the shape is enough to keep it snug and flat. Wherever they do bend or flex, however, you see the fabric that's on the other side. I like the dimensionality of it.

And that, folks, is my contribution to Scrap Your Stash. I'd love to hear what you think, and whether you've done something similar? Thanks again, other Susan, for having me!

Thanks Susan!

Don’t miss these other great Scrap your Stash posts {click the pic}:

Enter this week’s giveaway from Fabricworm {click the pic}

See ya tomorrow!

Like