It’s day six of quiltwoman.com‘s first blog hop and time for a quilt hack! Excited about the “water” theme for this hop, we pulled out an old work-in-progress-pattern, Deep Blue Sea.

This pattern presents several opportunities for great tips and tricks. Having recently discovered a new quilt hack that uses everyday household items to make our applique projects quick and easy, we decided to write a two-part series of blog posts about our in-house tests of machine applique techniques and hacks.

Machine Applique Hack #1 – Dryer Sheet and Chopstick Applique

Choose to use freezer paper to trace your templates or to trace them directly onto the fabric.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Stitch the freezer paper to the fabric using the drawn line.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tear away any freezer paper. Trim all of your shapes, leaving a generous 1/8″ seam allowance (3/16″). Snip the inside curves (those that curve into the body of the applique) to about one half of the distance to the sewn line, and snip the inside corners (those that point into the body of the applique) to within one thread of the sewn line.

Snip a hole into the dryer sheet, then turn the applique piece right side out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carefully push out the corners and points of your shape using the wooden chopstick. Watch out: the chopstick will push through the dryer sheet if you do not keep it snuggled in the crevice between the front of the shape and seam allowance.

If you’re feeling brave, you can continue to coax out the points, using a seam ripper or a pin to pull on the outside of the shape.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Press each of the applique shapes, keeping the dryer sheet hidden behind the fabric. You can use a straight or a decorative stitch to attach your appliques onto your project.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We threw together a couple of place mats using our test fishies. (Because you never test something on the actual sample, right???)

Our two cents: We found that this works fairly well on shapes that don’t have a lot of fine detail. In our example, it worked better on the star than on the fish, but both shapes came out with cute, cartoon-ish rounded corners. We’ll stick with other techniques when our appliques are precise and detailed, and save this technique for more simple designs. Please chime in and let us know what you think of using dryer sheets and chopsticks for machine applique. Is this something you have tried before, or is it Greek to you?

Next week we’ll show you an alternate technique and reveal which method we used on our sample of Deep Blue Sea.
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And don’t forget to check out the other blog posts in this week’s hop:

8/4/2015 Tammy Silvers http://www.tamarinis.typepad.com/
8/5/2015 Carol Steely funthreads.blogspot.com
8/6/2015 Heidi Pridemore www.TheWhimsicalWorkshop.com
8/7/2015 Kathie Donahue http://www.prairiecottagecorner.blogspot.com
8/8/2015 Toby Lischko gatewayquiltsnstuff.blogspot.com
8/9/2015 Jessica J.E. Smith www.quiltHacks.com
8/10/2015 Diane McGregor http://www.castillejacotton.net/blog