Applique Pillows #1

As hard as it is to believe, in all the years of sewing, quilting, machine embroidery and making things out of fabric, I have never turned out any pillows!

I am amazed. And, now that I have decided to spark up the living room with some good housekeeping and new slipcovers (soon to be ironed and applied), I have discovered a new fun way to spend my sewing time.

I'm using some gorgeous batik fabrics and am linking each pillow by using some black and white fabric to frame each one. This is the first one I finished.

It was a whole lot of fun to make the applique. Another newly fresh discovery for me. I've always hesitated doing much applique work because it seemed so laborious and I just don't like to see the heavy zigzag outline on everything. However, this time I just took out some Alieen's Hot Stitch Fusible Web that I've had hanging around for at least 10 years and I free hand drew the leaves and spiral. Now I really don't know why I drew the spiral, but that's what happened, so I went with it.

It's really easy to do applique this way!!! I love it! I pressed my drawings onto the back of the fabrics, cut out around the pencil line and placed it on the background batik. I didn't want to zigzag anything, so I rummaged through my drawers and found some fuzzy yarns that coordinated nicely and just used nylon thread to nail them down onto the edges of the appliques. It didn't take much time at all and I didn't ever use stabilizers for the back of the sewing area.

Amazingly, it didn't crinkle, pull, or otherwise distort the fabric. Again, I was amazed. All the books say stabilizers are a must, but I guess the applique fairies were with me that day and I got a beautiful result. It's a shame you can't see the fuzziness of the yarns.

After that, I wanted some sparkle, so I added hot fix Swarovski crystals. They don't show up in the photo either, but it sure looks nice when the morning sun hits them. A fuzzy, wuzzy, sparkle, sparkle pillow!