Winter Frolics Appliqué

The snow is NOT flying in Calgary yet, but I can't ignore that it is lurking right around the corner! And with the flurries outside will begin the frantic flurry of shopping and preparing for Christmas! The Shopping Channel gives me the perfect opportunities and excuses to start some seasonal crafting in advance and seeing how it is time to put away my Halloween Appliqué, I thought that I would replace it's spot on my mantle with a winter one! 

Pre-plan your design by cutting the shapes out of printer paper

Winter frolic has lots of fun images to choose from, and so I pre-planned my design by cutting out some shapes and tweaking them until I got the perfect sizes. Wow, pre-planning!! go figure! Who knew that I had it in me!?

Once everything was planned, may I just must stop again to remind you that I PRE-planned, I ironed Heatn'Bond to the back of all of my fabric. I personally am loving the Ultrahold weight for applique, and while I have also cut fabric that is backed with the HeatnBond light, the Ultrahold seems to deliver the very best results.

Next step is cutting the images, which of course will go VERY quickly if you have, ehem... pre-planned your cut sizes!

Some tips on cutting fabric with your Cricut machine:

   1. You MUST use a backing on the fabric, regardless of whether you are cutting cotton, silk or rayon.

   2. Use a new super sticky mat to hold your fabric securely in place while cutting. This will help give you a crisper cut.

3. A new blade is great, but not always 100% necessary. Try putting a new one in if you aren't getting a clean cut.

4. It's ok if the paper backing comes off of the fabric before you cut. It will still cut well!

5. If you are having trouble cutting, try flipping the fabric upside down to cut. Sometimes this works better! You can even use the 'Mirror Image' feature on your Cricut Expression or Create so that your image is still 'right side up'.

Iron your cut images into place and you are ready to stitch!

Once all of my images were cut out, I layered them onto the base fabric and started machine appliquéing them into place. I found it effective to have placed my 'snow' down first and top stitched it in place before layering any other pieces on top of it. This way, I could sew one continual topstitch instead of starting and stopping at all of the overlapped pieces.

Finished Appliqué

Once I was done stitching, I put a layer of batting behind my finished piece and then put it into a frame. 

Close Up! 

I think this little penguin guy is adorable and may end up on some Christmas cards as well! 

Happy Crafting!