A Day of Bits and Pieces

Today I worked on a few bits and pieces. I finished the quilting on the border of my Robert Kaufmann fabric Quilt, however had to wash some fabric to use for the binding. So I thought I make a start on preparing the applique pieces for my Drifting Leaves Quilt

As I only had strips to complete this quilt I ordered some of the Gold and Green Multicolour Print from the Dryad fabric range by Shannon Brinkley. It is absolutely beautiful

I think I said it before...the quality of this fabric is outstanding, one of those that you do not really want to cut into at all! If you have a minute head over to Shannon Brinkley's web site...love her work! She runs workshops on the web on her Scrappy Applique Technique...one of these days I would not mind signing up for that. But for now, I need to concentrate on getting some finishes happening.

I cut a 10in strip of each (that was all that I was going to give to those leaves) and traced the leaf shapes onto Applique Magic Plus (great product!). I then fused the shapes to the back of the fabric.

Next I cut out the shape on the drawn line and presto...we have a leaf on the quilt top

In between cutting my binding for the other quilt, I then trialed some of the stitches on my machine to attach the leaf shape. This is something I had wanted to do for some time as I still want to complete a little applique owl quilt using some of the cool stitches that come with the machine.

Here is my trial

I spend most of the afternoon mucking around with this, i.e trying to get the height and width of the stitches right

Love those two stitches...if you have a  Pfaff QE 4.2 or indeed any other machine where you can save stitches, are you using this feature? I keep forgetting that I have this option on the machine! Rather than remembering what setting I had for each stitch, I saved them in the setting that I liked and am now ready to go once I have cut out all 17 leaves. This is most useful as I did a lot of adjustment in terms of height, width and density to these stitches and without fail, the moment I changed one setting I had forgotten what setting I came from. Definitely need to use this more.

Felt very productive today.

Linking up to Let's Bee Social #147 over at Sew Fresh Quilts

Karin