Momento: Star Appliqué Pillow

The singer Memento makes cutting fabric shapes, easy and precise, which is great for so many different applications such as cutting appliques. So I'm using it to cut out my star shapes for my pillow sham, which is perfect because it makes sure that all of my stars are symmetrical and the perfect size that I want. So my pillow is made for my pillow Sham is made for a 16 inch pillow form. So I have my front panel cut at 17 inches square because I'm using half inch seam allowances. I know some people like to have their pillow sham finish at slightly smaller than their pillow form size.

So you don't get empty corners. So that's up to you. And then on the back of the pillow sham, we have an envelope closure for easy removal and washing and these panels are 17 by 11.5. So getting the shapes that you want to cut out for your appliques is super easy using the the crafting software that you use with the singer Memento. So let's take a look at that.

So here is the my sot uh software that you can download and we're going to go to crafting for this and to create a new project, you select your matte size. So I have a 12 by 24 mat and there's a lot of different things you can do in here. But to just hit the ground running, it's super easy to come over and grab some basic shapes and there's a ton of basic shapes just preloaded to choose from. And you can of course bring in um other designs, but I'm just going to, there's a couple different star shapes. I'm going to grab this star and then we can come up here to edit and we can change up the size of the star, make it bigger, make it smaller, move it around, add more things.

I actually already have my stars all set so you can save designs. So I'm gonna open this one up. So I have all of my stars exactly the size that I want them to be and you can see what size you're at, you can lock the proportions to keep it or you can um toggle that off to change up the shape and the size of them. So there is my design before we can send that file over to the machine, we have to load the fabric onto the cutting map. So here is the cutting mat, which is slightly tacky to hold the fabric down as it's going through the machine.

And here is my fabric and since we're doing appliques. I already have my fusible web fused onto the wrong side. I'm just going to peel that off and then we're going to place the fabric aligned with the upper left corner. So we want to align that along the upper edge and the side edge and we'll just press gently down to adhere it and smooth it down. So it's nice and smooth and flat.

And then we can load this into the machine and have it pushed up against those pinch wheels. And then we hit load mat and then our machine is ready so we can send the file that we created to the machine and cut our stars. So to send this file hit up here and I have my memento machine selected. So we hit send to machine and select your mat size. So mine is the 12 by 24 landscape next.

And the memento can cut a whole bunch of different materials. So you want to select what you are cutting. So I'm going to select fabric and you can select the type of fabric so it knows what to expect. So I'm cutting quilting cotton. So I just hit continue and they, they offer a couple of different options here.

So you can move it to move your design to the top. If you, if you had your shapes somewhere more toward the center. So it's just to conserve fabric, you can also rearrange to reduce waste or you can just leave it how you had it and then hit next. And because I've test cut this material before I know I need to increase the force a little bit, the force that the rotary cutter cuts with. And then you can adjust the speed.

These were just the presets based on the fabric that I chose. So I'm going to increase the speed a little bit and then you can hit, continue. So it's sending the file over to the machine and then the cutting machine is ready. So we can hit, start on the software or we can hit start on the screen on your cutting machine. So I'm going to come over here and hit, start cutting.

So the blade will move and cut out the design that I sent over and it really eliminates the need for templates. So before you might have found yourself a star template, printed it out, cut out the paper, traced it on to your fabric and then gone in with your scissors and cut out your stars where this, it combines it all into one. So you send the exact dimensions to the machine and it cuts it out. So once you send the file over, you can hit, go, walk away, come back and your stars are all cut out perfectly cut, precise to the exact size that you want. There's always a little bit of human error when it, when you're tracing your own templates, whether it's in a little error in cutting the template or marking the template or cutting it out with your scissors.

Whereas with this, you know, you're getting the exact shape and the exact size you want. So it's finished cutting. So we're going to hit close and eject map. So we can look at our appliques and I like to start by just peeling off the excess fabric and all of the stars are perfectly cut and you can take something to kind of get up under the edge. So there's our applique stars and on my one pillow, I did them all in the same fabric.

But for this one, I'm going to arrange a couple of different fabrics and a couple different star shapes. So we can swap over to the sewing machine and construct our pillow. So I have my star appliques arranged on the right side of my pillow front, sort of auditioned and arranged in a way that I like and you can move them all around to what sort of arrangement looks good to you. And then we're going to make sure that the, the fusible website is down. So you can tell if your fabric doesn't really have a right or a wrong side.

The feasible web is kind of shiny. So make sure that side is down and when you arrange these on your pillow front, just keep in mind you'll, you'll have half inch seam allowances here. So you wanna make sure you stay far enough away from that. So we're going to fuse that fusible web down to hold the applique shape down onto the fabric. And then we're going to stitch it down as well and stitching it down helps the applique to stay permanently even through wash and wear.

And it also gives a little design detail too. So you can use a thread that is high contrast to your fabrics and have a little pop, a little design detail. So we are going to stitch these on. So I have a slightly longer stitch length. Uh So I have a three millimeter stitch length and I'm going to just stitch about an eighth of an inch from the edge.

And I don't like to start in a point. I just feel like it makes it a little bit hard to um to join the end of the thread with the beginning. So we're going to start away from a point and we're going to start stitching and I left long thread tails and I don't back stitch, we'll tie our thread tails off manually just because backs stitching, sometimes you can get um a little lump of thread. So as you approach a corner stop with your needle down and pivot. So we're not pivoting at these inside corners and going around, we're going up and down kind of the way you learned to draw a star in primary school.

But of course, the way that you stitch your appliques down can change up the look a lot. So, experiment do different things. I, I think that this, it gives it a fun, like different organic look. So we're going to pivot at all of the corners and then we're going to end right where we began lift the needle up and we're going to leave some thread tails here as well because we're going to pull our thread tails to the wrong side and tie these off. So I'm going to pull these to the back.

If you can get them all, it's great. But if you only get three, that's also fine. That's all you need to lock these in. Here's my fourth one. So I'm just going to take these and tie them together.

So I don't get any thread lumps on the right side, tie that together and trim those off. So it's perfectly secured and I have my beautiful top stitching line on the right side. So we're going to do the same thing on all of our stars. All right. So all of our appliques are stitched on and tied off on the wrong side.

So we can set our front panel aside for a moment and we're going to bring in our back panels and on each back panel, we want to fold one long edge, we want to double fold, half inch to the wrong side. So we'll fold half inch once and then half inch again and press that and then from the right side, we're going to top stitch that edge to finish. So you want to align the edge just shy of the half inch mark on your throat plate so that, you know, you're going to catch this fold on the wrong side. And I still have my three millimeter top stitch length stitch on my machine. So you can feel that fold on the underneath as well, make sure we catch that fold.

So there's one back panel and do the same thing to the other back panel so that you catch the fold on the wrong side and then we can put it all together. So bring your front panel in and then you want to layer your back panels right sides down so that the finished edge is toward the center, align your raw edges. So we have this overlap and I'm going to pin in the overlap to make sure that stays put and then we're going to stitch the whole perimeter using our half inch seam allowance. Yes. So we're going over that overlap.

Now, when I'm approaching a corner, I actually don't like to pivot with the needle down right in the corner for a pillow. I, I don't like that really sharp point because a lot of times it just gets mucked up with the fabric uh inside the seam allowances. So instead of going all the way to my seam allowance distance from this side, I'm going to as I approach that corner, lift the presser foot and pivot at a 45 and take one or two stitches across that corner and then pivot and then stitch my next side. So I'm going to do that same thing on all my corners. So there is my pillow stitched all the way around the outside.

And before we turn this right side out, we want to clip across the corner. So I'm going to clip just right across the corner and then I'm a actually also going to double clip. So I'm going to clip that corner as well to get rid of all that bulk from inside that corner. It's going to help make it look nice and neat when we turn this right side out. So we can just reach in here through that overlap and pull that right side out.

You can use a point turner or a chopstick or a pencil to push those corners out. So there is our new pillow sham. So you can change up the applique shape to make a totally different style of pillow and using the singer Memento. It really makes it so easy, so precise and it really removes a barrier to trying more complex and challenging appliques. So whether you are cutting out simple square rectangle shapes for a piecing or quilting project or these more challenging appliques, the singer Memento makes it easy so you can let your creativity and imagination run wild