Faux Appliqué Techniques

Appliqué is a great way to embellish several types of projects. However, it can be a bit tedious. I'll show you how to make a super fun pillow using a process known as faux appliqué. Essentially, faux appliqué is where you take the decorative stitches on your machine and use them to outline the design that you have on a piece of fabric. Now, you can use a variety of different types of fabrics for this. You can always get a panel from the store and just do the outlines, or the design that you find there that you enjoy. Small or large panels will work well just depending on what size of a project you wonna do. You can get large scale prints where you would just outline a few or every single one if you were very ambitious of the print on the fabric and then that would look great as well. You can also make your own fabric if you wanted to have something completely and totally unique. Now, there are several different ways of making your own fabric. You can purchase printable fabric that you just put through your machine, or your printing machine at home and it'll print out at about eight and a half by 11 and it will display anything you wanted to print on fabric. You can also use photo transfer medium, which is a pretty new product where you apply a very chemically sort of glue to a picture that you print on regular paper and let it dry for 24 hours and you peel off the paper backing and that will create any image you want on fabric. And it can go on any lightness or darkness of fabrics. If you had a really, if you wonna make it on black fabric, the photo transfer medium would be a great way to do that. You can also just make up a design that you like, or visit a fabric printing websites such as Spoonflower and print out a fabric that you enjoy. They will do the printing for you. They will make it as large as you want, which is nice because if you're making a really large project, you might need a panel that's as wide as a yard, or even bigger. So, that's the advantage there. The technique I chose to use for this pillow was the freezer paper technique. Essentially, what you do here is you iron freezer paper to the back of a lightweight fabric such as muslin and you run it through your printing machine at home. So, your printer should have a manual feed function to be able to do this. If, the only limitation here is that you're limited by the size of paper you can put through your printer. So, my pillow form was 12 by 16 and I decided to use a tabloid size piece of paper which is 11 by 17. And I actually took it to a print shop down the street to print it out, just because my printer at home only likes to do eight and a half by 11. But once you print that out, you just wonna heat set it with an iron and no steam. So, once you've picked up the type of fabric you wonna use, I recommend making a stitch glossary of all the different decorative stitches on your machine. The nice thing here is that you'll see exactly how the machine creates the stitch as you create your stitch glossary. And because zigzag stitches to create a satin stitch is so important in this design for me, I was able to practice the length and the width of the stitch that I wanted to use, so that I could decide exactly what would be the best for this pillow. So, knowing what stitches you have is very invaluable. Once I finished my stitch glossary, I went ahead and started practicing just on a spare panel that I had. And I practiced on this side without any form of stabilizer and as you can see it puckers quite a bit. So, you're going to wonna use stabilizer on the backside of your fabric. Now, I went ahead and added batting to the other side of the fabric, and you'll see that it puffs up very nicely and gives it a textural element to it that you wouldn't really get if you just use stabilizer. That would make it very flat. So, once I practiced, I kind of knew how each stitch would look on individual items on my fabric and I was ready to start planning out how I would make my design work for me. So, what I did is I printed out my image exactly the same size that it was going to be on my pillow. And I took some markers and I wrote across the top the different colors of thread that I had and then the corresponding marker that I use to color code that. I went through and I marked stitches. Here I was gonna use 19 and here I was gonna use stitch number 24. And I just did that so that I would have a reference when I was sewing my pillow. You of course don't have to do this. I like to plan ahead though. So, that's why I did that. So, once you have your fabric printed, or your print panel ready to go, you need to prepare your fabric for this. So, I added a bit of batting to the back. I used cotton batting. Polyester batting is gonna, especially a high loft, is gonna kind of fluff off a lot into your machine and give you a little bit too much lint, or dander as you're working. That can kind of gum up the works in there. So, I don't necessarily recommend that. But, so, I put this cotton batting on the back and as you can see, I just stitched it on along the lines of my outer strips here. The way you decide what size you need to make your, the front of your pillow, is you base it off of your pillow form. Now, my pillow form was 12 by 16. So, I added an inch to each measurement. So, this is 13 by 17. The reason you add those inches is for seam allowances. So, now I have half inch seam allowances on both the width and the height. So, I'm ready to start stitching. I know according to my print out that I made, that I want to outline this hotel sign on my machine here. So, I tuned it up to the correct stitch and I got ready to go. Now, here I'm gonna reference my chart again. I'm using stitch seven and I wonna see the straight line of this is going to be performed on the left side of my presser foot. So, you just put your fabric into the machine carefully. And I like to roll over the side so that it's easier to maneuver as I work. You just line it up carefully here. And now, if you were just appliquéing this on your own, it would be important to, if you're hand appliquéing, it would be important to tie off your thread. With my machine, I can hit backstitch and it'll put a few stitches in place for me, which helps secure the beginning of the stitch. And I recommend doing that. If your machine just starts going backwards and doing the stitch backwards, that might be a little hazardous. So, if that's the case, I'll show you how to tie those off in just a moment. So, I have my needle in and I slowly start to stitch it out. And then I let it backstitch for a few. And then we just go around the machines, the sign of the hotel. And you can go as slow or as fast as you are comfortable. It just depends on what you're stitching and exactly when you're doing it. It's important to pay attention to how the stitch is made so that you can turn the corner and you won't get extra stitches just kind of randomly appearing on your fabric in an area that you don't want it to appear on. So, we'll just go across here. Okay, and we'll turn this way and roll the edge up for us. Now, I'm using just all purpose polyester thread in my bobbin, or you could use bobbin thread down there, whichever you prefer. You just wonna make sure it's the same weight as the thread that you're using on the top. Otherwise, it can start to cause some puckers and some issues as you sew. And you will need a variety of colors of thread for this project. So, it's a pretty fun reason to go stock up on thread. Okay, and you're just gonna kind of use the presser foot in the needle to pivot as you go, which is a fine way to do it. And just depending on how comfortable you are with your machine, you can move along at any rate that you wonna go. Okay, pivot one more time and then I'm almost done. Okay, and I let it backstitch a few stitches there. Raise my needle and clip the threads a little bit long 'cause you're gonna pull them to the backside with a hand needle. Let's see here. So, to finish it off, you wonna just put your hand needle into the material one stitch away from the last stitch that your machine did and put the thread through the needle and straight to the backside. And you know how threads like to be on me sometimes. Here we are. And then I'll pull it back. And back here you have the option of either tying them off, or, well, I recommend definitely tying them off a little bit. You can also just use a bit of stabilizer to seal the stitches in. Which once you finish all your stitches, you are going to wonna put some stabilizer on the back here. So, once you finished all your stitches, you need to move on to creating the back flaps for your pillow. Your back flaps are, essentially, they need to be as large as your pillow is on the front side. So, our front, my front panel was 13 by 17. So, I take 13 by 17 and I wonna have two inches of overlap for the flap, the envelope closure to overlap one another. So, that's gonna add four additional inches. We go from 17 to 21. And then I folded this over, let's see, I fold this over twice at a half inch each. So, that's an additional inch per back flap. So, that gives you two more inches which pushes you, puts you at 23. Divide that in half and you have 11 and a half. So, that's how you make your back flat measurements. So, you need to add four inches for overlap and two inches to fold over the pieces. And so, you have 11 and a half by 13 inch pieces and once you get those, you wonna just iron over first, a half, one half inch, and then an additional half inch to kind of seal that seam there. And you just sew those down. And you'll have two nice back flaps with, I did two rows of stitching just to extra secure that fold over there. Now, the side that has the fold on it is going to be the wrong side of the fabric. So, this is the right side here. This is the side that will face out on the back of our pillow when we are finished and they will overlap about by two inches like so. Okay, so, I finished all my stitches and as you can see, they're all in place and it looks very pretty. I'm ready to finish up my pillow. You wonna go ahead and seal those stitches. Now, you've pulled them through as I showed you and tied them off. However, you can also add an extra level of security with a level, a layer of stabilizer. I just used medium weight iron on stabilizer and just ironed that right to the back there. And it's gonna seal all my stitches in, which was very nice. And I added pom pom trim because that makes my pillow even more fun. You wonna base that in place about a quarter inch from the edge of the pillow, so that when you sew your half inch seam allowance, it tucks all of this blue trim along here in and you don't see that in the final product. So, now I'm ready to go. It's important to pin these on. So, remember, this side that has the fold on it is the wrong side. So, I'm placing right sides together like so. And these pom pom can be a bit of a nuisance to sew. When you're pinning, you need to pin every three or four pom poms just to have everything work out well for you. They can pull the fabric and they can be a pain. You can use a piping foot to assemble them, or to sew them on. However, I like to have a larger presser foot on my sewing machine because it tends to manhandle those pom poms as necessary and push them out of the way as it sews along. So, I'm just pinning every two, or three pom poms along as I go. And once you have everything pinned in place, you will just stitch around the edge a half inch with a half inch seam allowance. And you wonna make sure that you backstitch where you have your closures just because that's where you're gonna get the most wear and tear on your pillow. So, backstitch two or three times right where this folded edge meets the pillow and then you'll feel it when you go over it here, where this other folded edge of the your back flap meets the pillow. So, you stitch around, when you get to the corners, instead of stitching straight and pivoting, it's a good idea to stitch up to the corner and then do one or two diagonal stitches right at the corner. That'll help give you a more crisp corner look. So, once you have that all pinned in place and you've sown it around, you just turn it right side out and put your pillow form in and you have your pillow all ready to go. The nice thing about faux appliqué is that you don't have to worry about turning the edges. This is a fun technique you could use to do any number of things. You could put a child's drawing onto fabric and keep a memento forever. You could put a wedding photo, or any photo from any special occasion on and do the design lines of the photo and just decorate them with your stitches. This is one type of gift you can make that is truly unique. Or you can just make it for your own home if you wonna keep it. So, that's why I think faux appliqué is a little bit more fun than actual appliqué and I recommend using it whenever you get a chance.